As organizations grow and transform their IT infrastructures, maintaining consistency in patch management across various environments and cloud architectures has become a priority here at Microsoft and at companies elsewhere.

A recent shift from Microsoft Monitoring Agent (MMA) to Microsoft Azure Arc and Microsoft Azure Update Manager (AUM) offers us and others a unified solution for both on-premises and cloud resources. This transition is improving our patch orchestration while offering our IT leaders more robust control of our diverse systems internally here in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization.  

Moving to Azure Arc

Using MMA and shifting to AUM with Microsoft Azure Arc integration requires using Azure Arc as a bridge, enabling management of both on-premises and cloud-based resources under a single source.

Historically, the MMA allowed for “dual homing,” where IT teams could connect machines to multiple Microsoft Azure subscriptions with ease. This flexibility streamlined patch management and reporting across different environments.

This feature is particularly useful for us and other large organizations with multiple Azure environments, says Cory Granata, a senior site reliability engineer on the Microsoft Digital Security and Compliance team in Microsoft Digital. However, the newer Azure Arc-based AUM only allows machines to report into one subscription and resource group at a time.

This limitation required some coaching for teams accustomed to MMA’s dual-homing capabilities.

“It wasn’t really an issue or a challenge—just coaching and getting other teams in the mindset that this is how the product was developed,” Granata says.

Azure Arc’s streamlined approach offers an efficient path for IT teams like ours looking to centralize patch management, especially for diverse infrastructures that include cloud and on-premises assets.

Centralizing patch orchestration

One of the standout advantages of Azure Update Manager with Azure Arc is its ability to support patch orchestration across a wide range of environments.

“You have the ability to patch on-premises, off-premises, Azure IaaS, and other resources,” Granata says. “This flexibility extends beyond Azure to cover machines hosted on other platforms, and on-premises Hyper-V servers.”

For organizations with complex infrastructures like ours, this unified approach simplifies operations, reducing the need for multiple tools and platforms to handle updates. Whether managing physical servers in data centers, virtual machines across different cloud providers, or edge computing devices, Azure Arc ensures that patch management is consistent and reliable.

These changes have been very helpful internally here at Microsoft.

“The AUM is our one-stop solution for patching all these different inventories of devices, regardless of where they reside—on-premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid environments,” says Humberto Arias, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital.

This multi-cloud and edge computing capability offers IT leaders here and elsewhere the flexibility to scale their patch management efforts without being tied to a specific platform.

Migration challenges

While the transition to Azure Arc and AUM has brought us significant benefits, there have been some challenges, particularly around managing expectations for dual-homing capabilities.

The key thing we had to work through was that Azure Arc could only connect to one Azure subscription and resource group at a time. This required additional training for us—we needed to shift our mindset and adopt new workflows. However, after our people understood this limitation, the migration process was smooth.

“Fortunately, it only phones into one subscription and one resource group,” Granata says. “So, wherever it phones in is where all of your patch orchestration logs and everything must go as well, and it can’t connect into another subscription. This centralized approach simplifies reporting and patch management, but it did require some initial adjustments for teams accustomed to multi-subscription environments.”

Through coaching and training, our teams were able to adapt, and the long-term benefits of a more streamlined system quickly became apparent.

Azure Arc and AUM benefits

Following our migration, our teams began to realize the true benefits of using Azure Arc and AUM for their patch orchestration needs.

“The neat thing about using AUM with patch management and patch orchestration is the centralized control it provides,” Granata says.

For IT teams managing both internal IT assets and lab environments, the ability to oversee patching across a diverse range of systems from one location was a game-changer.

Additionally, the new system provided enhanced reporting and visibility.

While MMA offered flexibility in terms of connecting to multiple subscriptions, Azure Arc’s centralized model makes it easier to manage logs, reports, and patch statuses from a single dashboard.

“We’ve really enjoyed the increased visibility and ease of use that this has given us,” Arias says. “This is particularly valuable for large organizations like ours with distributed environments, where maintaining visibility across multiple systems can be a challenge.”

The integration with Azure Arc also extends your platform’s reach to non-Azure environments, including AWS and other cloud providers. This means that organizations running multi-cloud or hybrid cloud strategies can benefit from a unified patch management system, regardless of where their machines are hosted.

For IT leaders here and elsewhere, these improvements represent a significant step forward in our operational efficiency and security. By centralizing patch management under Azure Arc and AUM, we can ensure that our systems are up-to-date, secure, and compliant, without the need for multiple tools or platforms. We hope sharing our story helps you do the same at your company.

Here are some tips for getting started at your company:

• Azure Arc allows for a centralized management approach, providing IT leaders with a comprehensive view of their infrastructure.
• Azure Update Manager offers improved patch orchestration and update management, leveraging the latest Azure technologies.
• While the transition to Azure Arc brings numerous benefits, it also necessitates adjustments, particularly for teams accustomed to dual homing with the Microsoft Monitoring Agent.
• With some light coaching, teams can easily learn the new system’s capabilities and limitations.

Discover more about Azure Arc from the Microsoft Azure product group, including About Azure Arc, Azure Arc for servers, and Azure’s Cloud Adoption Framework.

• Learn more about management and monitoring for Azure Arc-enabled servers.
• Find out how we’re optimizing our shadow IT efforts with Microsoft Azure best practices.
• Check out how we’re running our customer service and support contact centers on Microsoft Azure.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.
• Please share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

The post Migrating from Microsoft Monitoring Agent to Azure Arc and Azure Update Manager at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

[Editor’s note: This content was written to highlight a particular event or moment in time. Although that moment has passed, we’re republishing it here so you can see what our thinking and experience was like at the time.]

Within Microsoft, there are some entrenched employee habits that make the company what it is, like living in email, dressing casually, and project managing a solution for every problem.

Also high on that list?

Saving files locally, a habit that has stuck with a company that grew up around Windows and its system of using folders to store and organize files.

Now, the company wants its employees to store everything in the cloud on OneDrive for Business, where it’ll be more secure and easy to access, plus several other reasons that will be shared below.

But first, about changing the entrenched habit of clicking File, Save As, and then navigating to your favorite folder on drive C.

“We thought about asking our employees to change their behavior, but then we asked ourselves, ‘Why? This is how our employees like to work,’” says Anne Marie Suchanek, a program manager on the team that manages OneDrive for Business internally in Microsoft Digital.

Instead, Microsoft Digital worked with the Microsoft OneDrive Sync team to deploy a feature called Known Folder Move (also available to external customers) that makes it possible for employees to save documents, and pictures to their file folder system the same way they always have. The only difference when they save their content via that familiar local drive file path is that their content also will automatically save to OneDrive for Business.

“Why change a good thing?” asks Suchanek, who is currently leading a rollout of the file-saving experience within Microsoft in North America. “We decided to go to them with a solution that will allow them to keep doing things the way they like to do them.”

Known Folder Move very specifically mimics the exact motions that employees (and all Windows users) have used for decades to save files—the only difference is now Microsoft and its employees enjoy the security and convenience of having their content automatically saved in the cloud.

Suchanek’s Microsoft Digital team is currently rolling out the feature via an email announcement that encourages employees to adopt early. After the opt-in phase finishes, the team will—after letting them know that it’s coming—silently deploy the system to everyone in North America (except those employees whose complex folder workflows would be disrupted by such a move). When North America is finished, the plan is to expand to the rest of the world.

It’s all part of the company’s journey to the cloud.

“We want to be a cloud-first company,” Suchanek says. “That means doing everything we can to embrace all the different features of the cloud, and part of that is getting our corporate data on the cloud.”
For a transcript, please view the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okOXBixpmZs, select the “More actions” button (three dots icon) below the video, and then select “Show transcript.”

Getting employees on board

Saving to the cloud is something most employees are already doing, given that OneDrive for Business has been an option for employees for quite a while, says Eva Etchells, a program manager on Microsoft Digital’s End User Readiness and Communications team. She also said many of them are accustomed to backing up their personal data on the version of OneDrive that supports their personal Microsoft email accounts.

“Mostly I’m just raising awareness about it so that they’re not surprised when it pops up as an alert,” says Etchells, who has the role of answering employee questions about deployments of new features like this. “I let them know it’s not malware.”

The main challenge is for developers who use intricate systems of folders to store their code on their individual PCs—a system that needs to stay intact to work correctly.

“We’re allowing those employees to opt out,” Suchanek says. “The product group is working on improvements that will improve the experience for engineers who migrate their PC folders to the cloud.”

Etchells says she’s mainly talking to employees about the benefits of moving their files to the cloud, which include being able to access files from any approved device; having everything backed up if something happens to your PC; being able to collaborate and share any file, even those on your desktop or in your documents folder; and better security.

That’s not the biggest benefit, however.

“The thing that wins them over is finding out that they’re going to get five terabytes of storage space,” says Etchells, who communicates openly with employees on Yammer. “Why would I put anything on my dev box if I’m going to have that much space? There is literally no reason to not do this.”

Suchanek says moving to the cloud brings a whole set of benefits regarding coauthoring.

“We want people to work in the cloud and to collaborate in the cloud,” she says. “When they do, this problem of creating many versions of the same document and then trying to merge them all together goes away. Once a document is saved into OneDrive, everyone is automatically working out of the same version.”

Making OneDrive better

The OneDrive product team rolled out the Known Folder Move feature 18 months ago to help deliver a modern desktop experience and drive engagement with OneDrive by allowing users to sync where they are accustomed to saving their files, says Gaia Carini, a principal PM manager on the OneDrive and SharePoint Team.

“We think of deploying this feature as a critical step toward having a modern desktop experience,” Carini says. “We are recommending that all of our customers take the necessary steps to make sure their important files are in OneDrive.”

She says Microsoft is no exception, and that she’s happy to see the company using Known Folder Move.

“We are excited to partner with Microsoft Digital to leverage some of those same benefits within Microsoft,” Carini says.

She says getting feedback and adoption from Microsoft employees helps the product group improve features before they are rolled out to customers—something that’s very useful to the product and the company at large.

For example, many customers have been waiting on the ability to deploy the Known Folder Move for users with local OneNote notebooks saved in their documents folder.

“If you have one of those notebooks, you can’t use Known Folder Move to move it to the cloud,” she says. “Fixing that has been a major request by some of our external customers. Microsoft Digital has been helping us validate our solution within the Microsoft deployment rings, which has been a big help.”

• Learn more about using the Known Folder Move feature at your company.

The post OneDrive for Business feature shifts how employees save files within Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

When Microsoft set out to move its massive internal workload of 60,000 on-premises servers to the cloud and to shutter its handful of sprawling datacenters, there was just one order from company leaders looking to go all-in on Microsoft Azure.

Please start our migration to the cloud, and quickly.

As a team, we had a lot to learn. We started with a few Azure subscriptions. We were kicking the tires, figuring things out, assessing how much work we had to do.

– Pete Apple, principal service engineer, Microsoft Digital

However, it was 2014, the early days of moving large, deeply rooted enterprises like Microsoft to the cloud. And the IT pros in charge of making it happen had few tools to do it and little guidance on how to go about it.

“As a team, we had a lot to learn,” says Pete Apple, a principal service engineer in Microsoft Digital. “We started with a few Azure subscriptions. We were kicking the tires, figuring things out, assessing how much work we had to do.”

As it turns out, quite a bit of work. More on that in a moment.

Now, seven years later, the company’s migration to the cloud is 96 percent complete and the list of lessons learned is long. Six IT datacenters are no more and there are fewer than 800 on-prem servers left to migrate. And that massive workload of 60,000 servers? Using a combination of modern engineering to redesign the company’s applications and to prune unused workloads, that number has been reduced. Microsoft is now running on 7,474 virtual machines in Azure and 1,567 virtual machines on-premises.

“What we’ve learned along the way has been rolled into the product,” Apple says. “We did go through some fits and starts, but it’s very smooth now. Our bumpy experience is now helping other companies have an easier time of it (with their own migrations).”

[Learn how modern engineering fuels Microsoft’s transformation. Find out how leaders are approaching modern engineering at Microsoft.]

The beauty of a decision framework

It didn’t start that way, but migrating a workload to Azure inside Microsoft is super smooth now, Apple says. He explains that everything started working better when they began using a decision tree like the one shown here.

Microsoft Digital’s migration to the cloud decision tree

First, the Microsoft Digital migration team members asked themselves, “Are we building an entirely new experience?” If the answer was “yes,” then the decision was easy. Build a modern application that takes full advantage of all the benefits of building natively in the cloud.

If you answer “no, we need to move an existing application to the cloud,” the decision tree is more complex. It requires the team to answer a couple of tough questions.

Do you want to take the Platform as a Service (PaaS) approach? Do you want to rebuild your experience from the ground up to take full benefit of the cloud? (Not everyone can afford to take the time needed or has the budget to do this.) Or do you want to take the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) approach? This requires lifting and shifting with a plan to rebuild in the future when it makes more sense to start fresh.

Tied to this question were two kinds of applications: those built for Microsoft by third-party vendors, and those built by Microsoft Digital or another team in Microsoft.

On the third-party side, flexibility was limited—the team would either take a PaaS approach and start fresh, or it would lift and shift to Azure IaaS.

“We had more choices with the internal applications,” Apple says, explaining that the team divvied those up between mission-critical and noncritical apps.

For the critical apps, the team first sought money and engineering time to start fresh and modernize. “That was the ideal scenario,” Apple says. If money wasn’t available, the team took an IaaS approach with a plan to modernize when feasible.

As a result, noncritical projects were lifted and shifted and left as-is until they were no longer needed. The idea was that they would be shut down once something new could be built that would absorb that task or die on the vine when they become irrelevant.

“In a lot of cases, we didn’t have the expertise to keep our noncritical apps going,” Apple says. “Many of the engineers who worked on them moved onto other teams and other projects. Our thinking was, if there is some part of the experience that became important again, we would build something new around that.”

Getting migration right

Apple says the Microsoft Digital migration team initially thought the migration to the cloud would be as simple as implementing one big lift-and-shift operation. It was a common mindset at the time: Take all your workloads and move them to the cloud as-is and figure out the rest later.

“That wasn’t the best way, for a number of reasons,” he says, adding that there was a myriad of interconnections and embedded systems to sort out first. “We quickly realized our migration to the cloud was going to be far more complex than we thought.”

After a lot of rushing around, the team realized it needed to step back and think more holistically.

The first step was to figure out exactly what they had on their hands—literally. Microsoft had workloads spread across more than 10 datacenters, and no one was tracking who owned all of them or what they were being used for (or if they were being used at all).

Longtime Microsoft culture dictated that you provision whatever you thought you might need, and to go big to make sure you covered your worst-case scenario. Once the upfront cost was covered, teams would often forget about how much it cost to keep all those servers running. With teams spinning up production, development, and test environments, the amount of untracked capacity was large and always growing.

“Sometimes, they didn’t even know what servers they were using,” Apple says. “We found people who were using test environments to run their main services.”

And figuring out who was paying for what? Good luck.

“There was a little bit of cost understanding, of what folks were thinking they had versus what they were paying for, that we had to go through,” Apple says. “Once you move to Azure, every cost is accounted for—there is complete clarity around everything that you’re paying for.”

There were some surprising discoveries.

“Why are we running an entire Exchange Server with only eight people using it? That should be on Office 365,” Apple says. “There were a lot of ‘let’s find an alternative and just retire it’ situations that we were able to work through. It was like when you open your storage facility from three years ago and suddenly realize you don’t need all the stuff you thought you needed.”

Moving to the cloud created opportunities to do many things over.

“We were able to clean up many of our long-running sins and misdemeanors,” Apple says. “We were able to fix the way firewalls were set up, lock down our ExpressRoute networks, and (we) tightened up access to our Corpnet. Moving to the cloud allowed us to tighten up our security in a big way.”

Essentially, it was a greenfield do-over opportunity.

“We didn’t do it enough, but when we did it the right way, it was very powerful,” says Heather Pfluger. She is a partner group manager on Microsoft Digital’s Platform Engineering Team, who had a front-row seat during the migration.

That led to many mistakes, which makes sense because the team was trying to both learn a new technology and change decades of ingrained thinking.

“We did dumb things,” Pfluger says. “We definitely lifted and shifted into some financial challenges, we didn’t redesign as we should have, and we didn’t optimize as we should have.”

All those were learning moments, she says. She points to how the team now uses an optimization dashboard to buy only what it needs. It’s a change that’s saving Microsoft millions of dollars.

Apple says those new understandings are making a big difference all over the company.

“We had to get people into the mindset that moving to the cloud creates new ways to do things,” he says. “We’re resetting how we run things in a lot of ways, and it’s changing how we run our businesses.”

He rattled off a long list of things the team is doing differently, including:

• Sending events and alerts straight to DevOps teams versus to central IT operations
• Spinning up resources in minutes for just the time needed. (Versus having to plan for long racking times or VMs that used to take a week to manually build out.)
• Dynamically scale resources up and down based upon load
• Resizing month-to-month or week-to-week based upon cyclical business rhythms versus using the old “continually running” model
• Having some solutions costs drop to zero or near zero when idle
• Moving from custom Windows operating system image for builds to using Azure gallery image and Azure automation to update images
• Creating software defined networking configurations in the cloud versus physical networked firewalled configurations that required many manual steps
• Managing on premises environments with Azure tools

There is so much more we can do now. We don’t want our internal users to find problems with our reporting. We want to find them ourselves and fix them so fast that our employee users never notice anything was wrong.

– Heather Pfluger, partner group manager, Platform Engineering Team

Pfluger’s team builds the telemetry tools Microsoft employees use every day.

“There is so much more we can do now,” she says, explaining that the goal is always to improve satisfaction. “We don’t want our internal users to find problems with our reporting. We want to find them ourselves and fix them so fast that our employee users never notice anything was wrong.”

And it’s starting to work.

“We’ve gotten to the point where our employee users discovering a problem is becoming more rare,” Pfluger says. “We’re getting better, but we still have a long way to go.”

Apple hopes everyone continues to learn, adjust, and find better ways to do things.

“All of our investments and innovations are now all occurring in the cloud,” he says. “The opportunity to do new and more powerful things is just immense. I’m looking forward to seeing where we go next.”

• Learn how modern engineering fuels Microsoft’s transformation.
• Find out how leaders are approaching modern engineering at Microsoft.

The post Boosting Microsoft’s migration to the cloud with Microsoft Azure appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Alex Thiede, digital transformation lead for Microsoft in Western Europe and a former Microsoft Azure field seller based in Vienna, set out to talk to other Microsoft Azure sellers to discover how to help them serve their clients better.

For a multi-billion dollar business with more than 3,000 sellers, the potential for impact was huge.

– Alex Thiede, digital transformation lead

What emerged was a common pain point around exploding data. An enormous amount of customer data was being produced, but it was being siloed into different systems that never connected. Cloud Solution Architects (CSAs) and Microsoft Azure specialists would have to go into Microsoft Azure portals for customer data, Microsoft Dynamics 365 to track their customer engagements, and the Microsoft Account Planning Tool to manage account plans.

For Microsoft Azure sellers, whose mission is to help their clients be successful with their cloud experience, it was difficult to get a clear picture of how their accounts were performing. They were spending hours analyzing their data, running it through their own Microsoft Excel sheets and Microsoft Power BI reports, before finally sharing their insights with their account teams which required even more hours spent building Microsoft PowerPoint slides.

“For a multi-billion dollar business with more than 3,000 sellers, the potential for impact was huge,” Thiede says. “So how do you bring those teams together on the IT side to have a customer-centric view?”

Thiede realized that this was a great question to answer with a Hackathon project.

Thiede assembled a team that included data scientists, field sellers, security specialists, and Microsoft Power Platform developers who were all passionate about solving the problem. They set out to build a solution using Microsoft Power Platform while demonstrating how IT and sales teams could come together in a citizen developer approach.

Within two weeks, the team had come up with the S500 Azure Standup Cloud Cockpit, a tool that brought all the data together in a configurable dashboard that put the individual sellers in the pilot seat.

For Jochen van Wylick, a cloud solutions architect, Hackathon team member and the lead CSA for strategic accounts in the Netherlands, that meant there could finally be a real tool to replace all of the manual unofficial hacking they had been doing to try to layer data in a meaningful way.

Van Wylick showed the team how they were adding additional metadata to the dozens of engagements they were tracking in their CRM to stay organized, and they incorporated that capability in an automated way.

“I like the fact that Alex implemented these ideas in the Stand Up Cockpit,” van Wylick says. “I also like the fact that it will boost my productivity.”

[Learn how Microsoft has automated its revenue processing with Power Automate. Find out how Microsoft is monitoring end-to-end enterprise health with Azure.]

The Microsoft Power Platforms and the power of citizen development

The team wanted to enter the Hackathon competition with a viable product to wow the judges. So, they used the Microsoft Power Platform to create a low-code tool that proved the feasibility of the Stand Up Cockpit while demonstrating how sales and IT teams could innovate together using a citizen developer approach.

Collaborating across six different regions on three continents in the first all-virtual Hackathon, the IT team members built the application environment while leaving the user interface up to the sellers to customize as they wished.

Stefan Kummert, a senior business program manager for Microsoft’s Field App and Data Services team, built the cockpit’s components on Microsoft Power Platform. Kummert says the challenge was the ability to create composite models layering Microsoft Power BI data with Microsoft Azure data analysis. While this is in fact a new Microsoft Power Platform Power Apps feature slated for release sometime in November, it wasn’t available to them at the time of the Hackathon in July.

“So, we tried to remodel this concept, more or less,” Kummert says. “We factored what’s available out of the box with some other Power Platform building blocks, and that’s what gave us all the functionality we needed.”

Sellers could now integrate their data sources into a composite data model, add custom mapping and commenting, gain insights at the child and business unit levels, and more quickly identify issues and potential for optimizations that would serve their clients. At the end of the Hackathon, they had a working prototype using real customer data.

The team largely credits this agility to the citizen developer approach, which empowers non-developers to create applications using low-code platforms sanctioned by IT. “There’s often not enough time to create applications in the classic way,” Kummert says. “I think citizen dev is changing the picture significantly, giving us a fair chance to address the huge amount of change happening in the business environment.”

Microsoft’s 2020 Empower Employees hackathon category. With their win, they were awarded dedicated resources and sponsorship from Microsoft Digital.

Turning the dream into reality

Fresh off their Hackathon win, the team is now working on moving the app into production and getting it into the hands of Microsoft Azure sellers.

They’ll first roll it out to 10 customers, then another 100, and if it’s successful, it will be built into the core platform and scaled out across the Microsoft Sales Experience, MSX Insights, Microsoft Organizational Master, and Microsoft Account Planning programs.

This rapid prototyping and incremental rollout is a strategy targeting increased adoption–an approach that’s appreciated by program managers like Henry Ro, who maintains sales and marketing platforms for Microsoft Digital.

Without the Hackathon, it would have been harder to bring this team together. Rather than doing this just once a year, why not have it as a regular working style? It’s about the energy, the inclusive culture, and the people coming together who have real passion.

– Alex Thiede, digital transformation lead

“Projects like the Azure Cockpit really make it easy for our team and others to validate an idea and take it to fruition,” Ro says. “We’re excited about its capabilities and how we can enable it.”

For their part, Thiede and the team are already itching for another Hackathon–or at least more projects driven by the same kind of inspiration and agility.

“Without the Hackathon, it would have been harder to bring this team together,” Thiede says. “Rather than doing this just once a year, why not have it as a regular working style? It’s about the energy, the inclusive culture, and the people coming together who have real passion.”

• Learn how Microsoft has automated its revenue processing with Power Automate.
• Find out how Microsoft is monitoring end-to-end enterprise health with Azure.

The post Microsoft Azure sellers gain a data edge with the Microsoft Power Platform appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Now that it has finished “lifting and shifting” its massive internal workload to Microsoft Azure, the company is rethinking everything.

“We’re rearchitecting all of our applications so that they work natively on Azure,” says Ludovic Hauduc, corporate vice president of Core Platform Engineering in Microsoft Core Services Engineering and Operations (CSEO). “We’re retooling to take advantage of all that the cloud has to offer.”

Microsoft spent the last five years moving the internal workload of its 60,000 on-premises servers to Azure. Thanks to early efforts to modernize some of that workload while migrating it, and to ruthlessly removing everything that wasn’t being used, the company is now running about 6,500 virtual machines in Azure. This number dynamically scales up to around 11,000 virtual machines when the company is processing extra work at the end of months, quarters, and years. It still has about 1,500 virtual machines on premises, most of which are there intentionally. The company is now 97 percent in the cloud.

Now that the company’s cloud migration is done and dusted, it’s Hauduc’s job to craft a framework for transforming Microsoft into a born-in-the-cloud company. CSEO will then use that framework to retool all the applications and services that the organization uses to provide IT and operations services to the larger company.

The job is bigger than building a guide for how the company will rebuild applications that support Human Resources, Finance, and so on. Hauduc’s team is creating a roadmap for how Microsoft will rearchitect those applications in a consistent, connected way that focuses on the end user experience while also figuring out how to get the more than 3,000 engineers in CSEO who will rebuild those applications to embrace the modern engineering–fueled cultural shift needed for this transformation to happen.

[Take a deep dive into how Hauduc and his team in CSEO are using a cloud-centric mindset to drive the company’s transformation. Find out more about how CSEO is using a modern-engineering mindset to engineer solutions inside Microsoft.]

Move to the cloud creates transformation opportunity

Despite good work by good people, CSEO’s engineering model wasn’t ready to scale to the demands of Microsoft’s growth and how fast its internal businesses were evolving. Moving to the cloud created the perfect opportunity to fix it.

“In the past, every project we worked on was delivered pretty much in isolation,” Hauduc says. “We operated very much as a transaction team that worked directly for internal customers like Finance and HR.”

CSEO engineering was done externally through vendors who were not connected or incentivized to talk to each other. They would take their orders from the business group they were supporting, build what was asked for, get paid, and move on to the next project.

“We would spin up a new vendor team and just get the project done—even if it was a duplication or a slight iteration on top of another project that already had been delivered,” he says. “That’s how we ended up with a couple of invoicing systems, a few financial reporting systems, and so on and so forth.”

Lack of a larger strategy prevented CSEO from building applications that made sense for Microsoft employees.

This made for a rough user experience.

“Each application had a different look and feel,” Hauduc says. “Each one had its own underlying structure and data system. Nothing was connected and data was replicated multiple times, all of which would create challenges around privacy, security, data freshness, etc.”

The problem was simple—the team wasn’t working against a strategy that let it push back at the right moments.

“The word that the previous IT organization never really used was ‘no,’” Hauduc says. “They felt like they had no choice in the matter.”

When moving to the cloud opens the door to transformation

The story is different today. Now CSEO has its own funding and is choosing which projects to build based on a strategic vision that outlines where it wants to take the company.

“The conversation has completely shifted, not only because we have moved things to the cloud, but because we have taken a single, unified data strategy,” Hauduc says. “It has altered how we engage with our internal customers in ways that were not possible when everything was on premises and one-off.”

Now CSEO engineers are working in much smarter ways.

“We now have agility around operating our internal systems that we could never have fathomed achieving on prem,” he says. “Agility from the point of view of elasticity, from the point of view of releases, of understanding how our workloads are being used and deriving insights from these workloads, but also agility from the point of view of reacting and adapting to the changing needs of our internal business partners in an extremely rapid manner because we have un-frictioned access to the data, to the signals, and to the metrics that tell us whether we are meeting the needs of our internal customers.”

And those business groups who unknowingly came and asked for something CSEO had already built?

“We now have an end-to-end view of all the work we’re doing across the company,” Hauduc says. “We can correlate, we can match the patterns of issues and problems that our other internal customers have had, we can show them what could happen if they don’t change their approach, and best of all, we can give them tips for improving in ways they never considered.”

CSEO’s approach may have been flawed in the past, but there were lots of good reasons for that, Hauduc says. He won’t minimize the work that CSEO engineers did to get Microsoft to the threshold of digitally transforming and moving to the cloud.

“The skills and all of the things that made us successful as an IT organization before we started on a cloud journey are great,” he says. “They’re what contributed to building the company and operating the company the way we have today.”

But now it’s time for new approaches and new thinking.

“The skills that are required to run our internal systems and services today in the cloud, those are completely different,” he says.

As a result, the way the team operates, the way it interacts, and the way it engages with its internal customers have had to evolve.

“The cultural journey that CSEO has been on is happening in parallel with our technical transformation,” Hauduc continues. “The technical transformation and the cultural transformation could not have happened in isolation. They had to happen in concert, and to a large extent, they fueled each other as we arrived at what we can now articulate as our cloud-centric architecture.”

And about that word that people in CSEO were afraid to say? They’re saying it now.

“The word ‘no’ is now a very powerful word,” Hauduc says. “When a customer request comes in, the answer is ‘yes, we’ll prioritize it,’ or ‘no, this isn’t the most important thing we can build for the company from a ROI standpoint, but here’s what we can do instead.’”

The change has been empowering to all of CSEO.

“The quality and the shape of the conversation has changed,” he says. “Now we in CSEO are uniquely positioned to take a step back and say, ‘for the company, the most important thing for us to prioritize is this, let’s go deliver on it.’”

Take a deep dive into how Hauduc and his team in CSEO are using a cloud-centric mindset to drive the company’s transformation.

Find out more about how CSEO is using a modern-engineering mindset to engineer solutions inside Microsoft.

The post How ‘born in the cloud’ thinking is fueling Microsoft’s transformation appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

This second episode takes a deeper dive into Falcon’s visionary ability to determine asset ownership at the enterprise level. Let’s tune in to this dynamic duo once again to learn more.

The post Falcon: Zeroing in on our assets appeared first on Inside Track Blog.