As the newest member of Veeam’s Product Strategy team, I’m enhancing my knowledge and becoming more hands-on with Azure and Veeam’s backup and recovery solutions for the cloud. This post is part of a series called “Learning Azure Through Community” that will cover human and technological considerations and my own experiences with Azure, Veeam Data Cloud, and related topics. Today, I’m sharing things I learned in my initial Azure training that I hadn’t necessarily considered before.
Consistent Change Requires Consistent Learning
Technology changes fast; and every change gives us the chance to learn. My experience with the cloud has been consistent yet random, picked up through years of leading and participating in tech meetups, blogs, webinars, videos, talks, and the all-important hallway track at conferences. At every event, there’s some new feature, product, or consideration that experienced cloud professionals are buzzing about. Meanwhile there are new cloud users every day with varying levels of knowledge. The constant change plus constant influx of new users means there’s always a place for updated training and documentation at all skill levels.
Licensing and Subscriptions Matter
When I decided to work toward my AZ-900 certification, I took a few practice tests and did well on them with one big exception. I knew that licensing and subscriptions mattered for cost and budget considerations but had never really thought about them farther. I’d never needed to. I later realized it’s important to understand licensing and subscriptions so you can decide how to use your cloud services, identify irregularities, and make product decisions most efficiently. A basic understanding of Azure licensing and subscriptions will give you a head start.
The Cloud Is Just Someone Else’s Computer.. Kinda
Attend a technology conference and you’re almost guaranteed to see a t-shirt or laptop sticker that says something like, “The cloud is just someone else’s computer”. It always makes me laugh, especially when I see it on a cloud expert, because they’re not entirely wrong. Cloud and physical servers work the same way for storing data and running applications, though they’re hosted by third-party providers rather than on-prem data centers. The cloud goes beyond a traditional server by providing more flexible data access, scalability, reliability, and cost control. It enables remote teams to collaborate, retailers to scale their website traffic, and your family to back up the pictures on their phones.
Cloud Needs Security
Whether they’re located in your on-prem data center or hosted in a cloud, all servers are prone to many of the same security challenges and require the same considerations. You can lose your data regardless of where your applications are hosted. With either solution, you need to make sure firmware and patches are in place, you have configured security products like firewalls and MFA, physical security, and monitoring. The nice thing is that cloud service providers have teams dedicated to security and can scale their resources and support as needed.
Cloud Needs Backup
I often hear people say things like, “it’s backed up to the cloud, so it’s fine.” But what if something, perhaps a ransomware attack, happens to the cloud causing you to lose that data? People often take it for granted that everything is automatically backed up and recoverable because it’s in the cloud; but this isn’t always the case. This is where Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure comes in. We offer backup and recovery solutions that you can implement if your data is lost. So even if you do suffer a data loss, we’ll have you back up and running quickly. I’ll talk more about why and how to install and configure Veeam Backup for Azure in the future.
🤔 Right now, I’m curious. What surprised you most when you were first learning about Azure or the cloud in general?
