welcome to Office Mechanics. Coming up on the show if you're using or thinking about
using managed private networking for Cloud services or inter office communications
today we're going to take a close look at ExpressRoute for Office 365, a premium
way to connect to the service. We'll explain how it works and what to expect
and some of the benefits ranging from improved privacy to predictable
performance and availability.
Great to be here last time I was here we talked about the scope of the Microsoft
network that Office 365 uses, what we do to manage traffic, and the tools
you have to plan and optimize network performance. We brought a lot of great
tips and if you are an admin watching, you might have been wondering what if
I have a managed private WAN and I wanted to get some better or predictable performance
before now the answer would have been that you have to have an internet
connection to connect to Office 365 and we do provide secure Internet
connections. All connections are secure with SSL and other technologies like
RMS, DLP and MFA and you can also manage performance and availability for
Internet connections. But some of you may want more, you're looking for a premium
network connection where you can work with a single network operator who can
provide direct connectivity to Microsoft networks today you might have multiple
sites and you might have an offsite data center are all connected using a
private managed WAN and need to connect to Office 365. you'd have a separate public
Internet connection to do that so with ExpressRoute for Office 365 you can add
connectivity from your private WAN directly into Microsoft networks
providing routing for most of the Office 365 traffic for your productivity
use. A lot of you out there have been investing for years in order to gain
control over traffic passing to and from your network and your organization, but what
other benefits are there? Right, this is all about getting control and having
control over your network connection means you can have better increased data
privacy, predictable performance and better availability and so all of the
Office 365 workloads including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online Skype for Business and
OneDrive the Business will connect over ExpressRoute, however you still need to
have public internet connection for a few of the services that we use
particularly for accessing an on-premises identity provider
sign in, also for Office 365 ProPlus license activation and also for the
downloads for Office 365 ProPlus if you're using web direct installation.
I know a lot of people are thinking Office 365 ProPlus installers are
around 1 gigabyte in size
why can't I use the the private WAN in that case to install? Most people
actually are. If you have a organization of that size you're
probably using things like Configuration Manager to push out those installations
of Office 365 ProPlus and now we've announced that it will support BITS (Background
Intelligent Transfer Service) also for
bandwidth throttling in the background as well for the Office 365 ProPlus
installations. A lot of great news there. Now you mentioned performance earlier
how does that get better? Right, so let's talk about that a little bit and what
predictable performance means. If you're using the internet to connect to Office
365 you're paying for a certain amount of bandwidth with an Internet service
provider and typically that Internet service provider will work with a number
of other network operators to back haul your traffic back to the Microsoft
network so you don't have discussions with or control over the route that
those network operators use because you really don't talk to them at all and so
you know remember last time we talked about that ferry analogy. This is a
little bit like that think about your driving one of those cars off the ferry
I mean 700,000 other cars were driving off and you still gonna get home and depending
on what the congestion is with those other cars and what the weather is like
you might take one route or another route we might give up and take a taxi
to get home and so your time to get home is really unpredictable and your
route is also unpredictable. So imagine if you had a network service provider
who could build you your own road from the ferry terminal to your home then
your route is gonna be predictable and your time to get home is going to be
very predictable as well it's a little bit like what ExpressRoute gives you.
That doesn't necessarily mean that if you're on the public Internet that your
your route home in this case your route to and from the data centers is much
slower. It could be the same speed in fact but you got predictable routing in
using this private managed network. Right, and so the third benefit is about
availability
so each circuit that is provisioned for ExpressRoute has two physical
connections actually into two physical route as well and we offer our 99.9%
uptime SLA on the Microsoft network components including everything from the
data center to the ExpressRoute router the network connectivity provider connects to we
don't of course provide as Microsoft an SLA for the network connectivity
provider equipment you talk to them of course about that and we even allow you
to have multiple circuits in ExpressRoute and they can even be from separate
network providers, giving you even more availability options.
A lot of people are wondering how they can actually take advantage of this
today so why don't you give us some background some of the scenarios that
you'll be able to use this gets rolled out. Alright so the simplest scenario is
that you are an existing an ExpressRoute customer and you're using that for
connectivity to Azure services and so the good news there is that Azure and
Office 365 services are hosted in the same Microsoft data centers. A lot of
people don't even know this. Alright and we use the same worldwide network to
connect those data centers together and to connect them to the internet so if
you're connected there, you're already connected. Now there will be some
configuration changes required and we're currently working to ensure there's many
of those configuration changes are handled by Microsoft or by the network
connectivity provider and hopefully none will be required by the customer.
The last show was even though you're coming from an on premises
environment for things like mail or file sync and share, you still wanna be doing
things like capacity planning using the tools we talked about the last show
to actually see how much more traffic you're going to use it even with that managed
connection. You'll need to know how much more headroom you're gonna need for
those connections back to the data centers. Right, yeah if you have more than
25 users as we do recommend that baselining seeing how much traffic you're using now
you're very likely to increase the amount of capacity you have on your
ExpressRoute connection. What's our second scenario then? Alright, the second
scenario is where you have multiple offices and probably an offsite data
center and you've got this private managed WAN already setup and so if
that private WAN
is run by network connectivity provider who is also an ExpressRoute partner with
Microsoft, then they can provision Office 365 and Microsoft network directly onto
that managed WAN so it just appears as an additional site that you have on your
private WAN right so it looks like from a networking perspective almost like our
data center as one of the nodes and your hub and spoke model of your private WAN
going as another one of those data centers, right? Yeah ,exactly right so you've got
i mean you've got very similar concepts in terms of the way you use an offsite
data center and how Office 365 might look. What are the other ways that
you can connect? so the the other scenario that we want to talk about is is
actually called the Exchange Provider Model. Not to be confused with the
Exchange Server in the mail service. Right its called that because the
connection is done at a network exchange sort of similar to old school telephone
exchanges. So the scenario is where the exchange provider actually gives you
just a couple of network ports on a router and it's up to the customer is how they
can get those network ports so this is typically useful if you're a very large
you have a very large network and you may already have connectivity at one of
those colocation facilities where ExpressRoute routers are. You do manage your own
deployments of individual network link so having those ports just be made
available you can get it was just exactly what you want. Good stuff, Paul, thanks
for joining us today
course all these and more can be found on the Office Mechanics on
Wednesday or as news break. Thanks and goodbye for now!