Hybrid Cloud Solutions: Amazon Web Service (AWS) and Microsoft Office 365

Can Microsoft Office 365 and Amazon Web Services (AWS) work together?  The answer to this cloud riddle is YES.  

There seems to be an overall confusion between what these Cloud venders provide as services.  To be clear, Amazon Web Services is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider and Microsoft Office 365 is a Software as a Service (SaaS).  

In enterprise deployments of Office 365, many organizations have requirements to manage and synchronize user profiles to Office 365, restrict user access, provide secure mobile access, and advanced Exchange/Lync/SharePoint management (Remote PowerShell and management consoles).  

In order to satisfy these requirements, organizations will need to deploy the following components within their controlled environment:

• Mobile Management Solution (Blackberry Enterprise Server 10)
• Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) internal and proxy
• Exchange and Lync Management Console
• Remote PowerShell for SharePoint, Exchange, Lync, and other Office 365 components

Some of our clients have elected to move these components into their own Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) within Amazon Web Services (AWS) so that they can take advantage of the power of AWS (Elastic, Pay as you go model, network, high availability, etc…) and remove their dependencies on managing their own data centers. Once these components have been deployed they can be configured to integrate/communicate with Office 365 Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, and other Office 365 components.

JHC Technology has also designed and implemented virtual application and desktop technology to run on Amazon Web Services.  We are able to deploy the Microsoft Outlook virtual application as well as other office products on AWS and connect them to Office 365.  In this scenario, users are able to connect to an AWS region and access Outlook either via virtual desktop or virtual application from any device and pull down their Office 365 exchange mail securely.

Organizations should not be tied down to use only one cloud model (IaaS vs SaaS). They should look at their overall requirements and choose an architecture that is flexible enough to expand for future requirements.

James Hirmas is the CEO for JHC Technology.  He can be reached at jhirmas(at)jhctechnology.com,@JHC_JamesHirmas, or connect with him on LinkedIn.