Microsoft Cloud Networking – The Poster!

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If there’s one thing I’ve learned while doing IT, it’s that nothing is really simple.  And with the addition of the “cloud” when it comes to providing services for your business or your customers, things just keep getting more complicated.  Remember the days where you had one nice T1 coming into your office and all was right in the world?  (Ah… the good ol’ days….)

Anyway, sometimes when you are looking at changing the networking for your company to support more cloud offerings like Office365 or moving workloads into Azure, you could really use a cheat sheet to get you pointed in the right direction and give you some insight into what you might need to research further as you work on your design.  Enter the “Microsoft Cloud Networking for Enterprise Architects” poster!

This printable, 8-page poster (it fits on legal paper) gives you the skinny on the design components and considerations for networking in the cloud age.  Topics cover are:

  • Evolving your network for cloud connectivity  Cloud migration requires changes to the volume and nature of traffic flows within and outside a corporate network.
  • Common elements of Microsoft cloud connectivity  Integrating your networking with the Microsoft cloud provides optimal access to a broad range of services.
  • Designing networking for Microsoft SaaS (Office 365, Microsoft Intune, and Dynamics CRM Online)  Optimizing your network for Microsoft SaaS services requires careful analysis of your Internet edge, your client devices, and typical IT operations.
  • Designing networking for Azure PaaS  Optimizing networking for Azure PaaS apps requires adequate Internet bandwidth and can require the distribution of network traffic across multiple sites or apps.
  • Designing networking for Azure IaaS  Optimizing networking for IT workloads hosted in Azure IaaS requires an understanding of Azure virtual networks (VNets), address spaces, routing, DNS, and load balancing.

There are several other posters that might be of interest as well, focusing on identity, security and storage. Find them with some other handy resources for IT architecture.