{"id":10690,"date":"2018-09-20T16:00:59","date_gmt":"2018-09-20T23:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=10690"},"modified":"2023-06-15T15:15:29","modified_gmt":"2023-06-15T22:15:29","slug":"optimizing-network-performance-for-microsoft-office-365","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/optimizing-network-performance-for-microsoft-office-365\/","title":{"rendered":"Optimizing network performance for Microsoft Office 365"},"content":{"rendered":"
This content has been archived, and while it was correct at time of publication, it may no longer be accurate or reflect the current situation at Microsoft.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
As the earliest adopter of Microsoft products, Microsoft Digital deployed Microsoft Office 365 across the company. To optimize network capacity and performance, we took time to create and implement strategic plans for network-related technologies. We used industry-leading performance and migration approaches and adopted cloud infrastructure services to successfully move our complex global environment to Office 365.<\/p>\n
As the earliest adopter of Microsoft products, Microsoft Digital, formerly Microsoft Core Services Engineering and Operations (CSEO), began deploying Microsoft Office 365 in 2011. To optimize for network capacity and performance, they implemented strategic plans for network-related technologies. Microsoft Digital has continued to evolve industry-leading performance and migration approaches, and they have adopted cloud infrastructure services to promote a successful transition to Office 365.<\/p>\n
After many years of investment in the on-premises network, Microsoft Digital and its internal customers were accustomed to a highly reliable connectivity experience with Microsoft Office products. When Microsoft Digital began planning and testing the move to cloud-based Office 365, they analyzed network infrastructure and processes to find potential performance issues before beginning the migration. This analysis was important to learn whether the existing infrastructure would support the demands of moving a large enterprise service to the cloud. And it was critical to maintaining the quality of service necessary for employee productivity in Office\u00a0365.<\/p>\n
To test the Office 365 migration, Microsoft Digital identified about 2,000 datacenter-hosted mailboxes to migrate to the cloud starting on a Friday night. At that time, Microsoft Exchange used caching to compensate for latency in mailboxes that were geographically distant from their users, and regular email synchronization to local mailboxes provided optimal performance. The initial mailbox migration was completed successfully over the weekend. On Monday morning, users logged in and their client machines began to synchronize through the Internet to the cloud all at once. The sudden demand overloaded the gateway to the Internet and caused an outage.<\/p>\n
Valuable lessons were gained from this test, which have been applied to migration planning processes since then. A key lesson was that collaboration and communication between network and migration teams, working together on more extensive modeling or smaller-scale tests, might have revealed that the infrastructure could not support a 2,000-user migration. Having tightly integrated teams that can identify issues on multiple levels is the best way to avoid migration missteps.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, the technology used during the test was slated to be replaced by new technology that could support the traffic and significantly increase bandwidth. This test experience accelerated that replacement and eventually allowed for successful continued mailbox migration.<\/p>\n
The Exchange cloud migration experiment was the foundation for a broad, ongoing cloud performance initiative. An essential first step was to closely engage the network and infrastructure teams, who could identify the tools and strategies necessary for a major migration from on-premises servers to the cloud and allow Microsoft to take full advantage of the benefits of cloud services.<\/p>\n
Traditional on-premises server systems, despite lacking the scalability of the cloud, had one advantage: network connectivity had been optimized and provisioned over many years, and any bottlenecks had been addressed. Before moving to Office 365, Microsoft used remote datacenters for many user locations. And, like most IT organizations, Microsoft Digital already had experience with explicit planning for network capacity, beyond simply laying the largest available cable between users and servers.<\/p>\n
For Microsoft Digital to maintain the performance that users expect while migrating powerful applications such as SharePoint and Exchange to their cloud-based versions, it needed to ensure availability and connectivity.<\/p>\n
During the migration, Microsoft Digital managed and addressed performance issues that users may have experienced by:<\/p>\n
When Microsoft Digital began large-scale migration to Office 365, readiness efforts included performing high-level capacity analyses, adding redundancy to ensure Internet availability, and optimizing connectivity for all users. And each Office 365 service presented unique migration challenges that had to be considered and planned for. SharePoint Online and Skype for Business are two examples of the diversity of the performance optimization experiences, efforts made, and lessons learned as part of the Office 365 migration. Microsoft Digital continues to serve as the company’s first and best customer today, piloting new cloud solutions that will offer even better network performance for Office services in the future.<\/p>\n
Teams within Microsoft Digital make broad and continual performance optimization efforts across the Office 365 suite of applications to enable a high level of employee productivity during and after migrations. These efforts include performing capacity planning calculations, providing redundancy and resiliency where appropriate, and creating the shortest path possible between the client and the cloud.<\/p>\n
Enterprise employees place many demands on a network. Information workers, salespeople, and engineers all have different network utilization patterns and productivity needs. When Microsoft Digital is preparing to bring a new site online or relocate a team, a carrier services manager uses a generalized calculation to determine how much service a given location will need.<\/p>\n
For example, capacity guidelines within Microsoft Digital were formerly 110 Kbps per sales person and 300 Kbps per developer.\u00a0As services have become data-hungry and teams have become more widely dispersed, the typical user\u2014regardless of job function\u2014is now estimated to use about 400 Kbps of bandwidth during normal activity. Although this is a subjective guideline that may be affected by many factors (concentration of users, size of campus, remote access, non-user access, and so on), it is a practical starting point.\u00a0Estimating initial capacity will ultimately reduce the level of investment needed to provide an acceptable level of service and satisfy business needs at that location.<\/p>\n
Microsoft Digital has a policy to deploy an Internet edge stamp that can sustain the expected capacity demand for the next 18 months. The design can scale to double the capacity during the useful life of the hardware, which is typically three to five years. This relatively simple policy provides the advantage of being able to size the circuit (which may be owned by an external provider) up or down as needed when a team moves or its size changes.<\/p>\n
Provisioning in this manner is much easier and less expensive than deploying more equipment and increasing the size of the edge later. This practice provides a great degree of agility as well as the ability to optimize connectivity for both cost and performance, with minimal complexity and low risk of outages.<\/p>\n
By investing in thorough migration preparation, Microsoft Digital has seen a positive effect on the speed of the migration, availability of the service, and quality of the user experience. When planning for Office 365 migration, Microsoft Digital recommends investing the time to create profiles, calculate capacity needs, and build the network out in anticipation of these needs. Office 365 has published capacity-planning tools to help customers size their own bandwidth needs (see the For More Information section).<\/p>\n
In locations where Internet connectivity is critical, such as operations centers where employees must work on site with no option for remote work, Microsoft Digital introduced circuit redundancy by providing more than one physical connection to the site via different carriers. If one carrier service fails, a secondary carrier can provide backup service. This redundancy is critical in business climates that rely heavily on cloud productivity services like Office 365, and where Internet connection failures result in reduced employee efficiency.<\/p>\n
Microsoft Digital also uses global network redundancies for alternative routing in case of disaster. This strategy was tested in 2011, when a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan brought down power and severed network connections with the west coast of the United States for several days. The existing network redundancy allowed Microsoft Digital to route around the severed connection to reach other worldwide destinations through unaffected redundant regional connections.<\/p>\n
Most enterprise networks were not built to optimize the flow of traffic from local intranets to services on the Internet. In many IT organizations, intranet performance is still prioritized over Internet performance. For large organizations planning a migration to Office 365 cloud services, a prioritized focus on Internet performance and availability, with increased emphasis on Internet connectivity and redundancy, is important to a successful transition.<\/p>\n
As the suite of Office-related services expanded and were more heavily used for productivity purposes by their employee base, Microsoft Digital did a networking \u201creality check,\u201d comparing connectivity methods based on user location. This process involved closely examining the data traffic patterns of Exchange and SharePoint services. Although the traffic patterns varied significantly with each service, the fundamental connectivity optimization made by Microsoft Digital improved network performance across each service and improved overall user productivity.<\/p>\n
During this optimization effort, Microsoft employees in major campuses and large office buildings were connected through the corporate intranet, which has reliable and robust private networking.<\/p>\n
Similarly, smaller Microsoft branch offices (Internet-connected clients) previously connected to the corporate intranet via a leased line or a persistent VPN, so their local connectivity was an extension of the corporate intranet, with no on-site edge. This was a suboptimal experience for users accessing Internet-based Office services.<\/p>\n
For example, the closest hub to a sales office in New York might be in North Carolina; to reach the Internet, traffic would first have to travel from New York to the corporate intranet in North Carolina. Microsoft Digital improved connectivity in such situations by creating an Internet edge at these branch sites, which gave them direct Internet access.<\/p>\n
To further increase the efficiency and improve the user experience, Microsoft Digital allowed users to use Internet path even if they were simultaneously connected to the intranet via VPN or other remote access solutions. This was accomplished via a \u201csplit tunneling\u201d configuration. All these measures set up a client connectivity model that was ready for the move to the Internet-delivered public cloud service that is Office 365.<\/p>\n
Direct paths to the Internet typically required advanced data loss prevention measures. This usually involved integrating advanced client security protection, such as antivirus and antimalware safeguards, Windows Firewall, and cloud-based security. Before migrating to Office 365, Microsoft Digital had to examine all data as it left the internal network. With Office 365, however, the destination cloud services scan and analyze files to determine whether they violate any policies, and traffic can safely travel, for example, from a home office to the Internet to the service without the added security measure of sending it through the managed edge.<\/p>\n
Microsoft Digital strives to further remove the dependency of apps on the corporate network and use Azure or Office 365 as the default access points. The corporate network serves a significantly reduced role in the modern app infrastructure, and a reduction in corporate network saves costs. Microsoft Digital calls this initiative Internet First.<\/p>\n