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.

JHC Technology's Best Practices for Amazon Web Services

JHC Technology has utilizing Amazon Web Services (AWS) since its beginning in 2010, and is now an Authorized Government Partner, an Advanced Consulting Partner and a Channel Reseller for AWS. 

Not only do we recommend AWS as the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform for our clients but I am happy to say that JHC has never purchased any datacenter equipment/infrastructure for our internal systems or operations.  

All JHC infrastructure has been deployed in the AWS cloud platform since we started to include:  

• Blackberry Enterprise Server, 
• Exchange
• SharePoint
• Active Directory
• Citrix
• Test/Development environments

Through the course of the last three years, I have been mentally drawing up a list of JHC best practices for deploying solutions/datacenter operations on the Amazon Web Services platform.   Below are a few examples:

• Fail quickly, often, and cheaply.
• Architect a Zero Trust Model for your AWS Solution.
• Own your AWS accounts and use consolidated billing with a trusted AWS reseller.
• Design for Disaster Recovery and High Availability for both AWS infrastructure and applications deployed on AWS infrastructure.
• Utilize AWS Storage Gate, S3, and Glacier for full lifecycle backup and restores.
• Put in place least privilege administration security policies for AWS Identity and Access Management.
• Do not take a cloud and/or Infrastructure as a Service only posture.  Consider hybrid Cloud solutions that utilize on premise infrastructure, Platform as a service, and/or Software as a Service that integrate with your AWS solution.
• Architect for least viable solution and use business rules to auto scale up and down.
• Deploy your Development and User Acceptance Testing environments on AWS.  Design solution to turn on environments only when needed and automate shut down of environments.
• Deploy your infrastructure inside Virtual Private Cloud that crosses multiple availability zones within an AWS region.
• Decouple compute and storage when possible but realize that most clients’ applications can’t be deployed in this manner.  Consider deploying legacy applications inside AWS and provide roadmap for refactoring to make application more AWS cloud friendly/efficient.

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.

Deleted Emails? One More Step For Hope

Since my last blog, we reviewed several ways to recover deleted email items. From recovering files from the deleted items folder within MS Outlook to searching the dumpster on an exchange server. However, there is one more way to retrieve deleted email items. And that is through your system backups.

All businesses maintain some sort of disaster recovery model that includes regular backups of their email systems. Using a 3rd party tool like Symantec Netbackup and Microsoft Exchange, an entire email database containing user mailbox data can be restored. The information can then be imported back into the user’s mailbox. The steps are simple and as follows:

1. You want to obtain as much information as possible regarding the user’s missing emails. Particularly which email folders are missing mail (i.e. Inbox, Sent Items) and the dates the emails are missing from. This is very important because the restore point selected will be based on the date the exchange server was backed up.

2. You will need to create a Recovery database (RDB) in preparation for the restore process on your MS Exchange server. This recovery database will house an email database and log file information for the mailbox that you want to restore. The database must be dismounted and ready to be overwritten by a restore. These are options that can be selected once the RDB is created.

3. You need to use your third party backup tool to display a timeline of the backup jobs that were performed on the exchange server. You want to select a date prior to that of the missing email and one that will contain the latest backup information. Once obtained, you will start what’s known as a restore to process to pull the email database information from its stored location (backup tapes, disk space, etc.) which is usually rather large file so make sure that you have enough drive space in which to populate the data. The data is placed into the RDB based on a selected path that’s predetermined that tells the Netbackup where to place the restored files.

4. After the restore is completed, using MS Exchange Management Powershell, you can run a simple script to populate the missing emails directly into the users’ mailboxes with no user intervention required.

It’s that simple. You have now gone through the process of restoring missing email files from a recovery database.

Jeronna Freeman  is the Cloud Administrator for JHC Technology.  She can be reached atjfreeman (at) jhctechnology.com or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Various Ways to Recover Deleted Emails

Oops! We’ve all done this. We’ve all hit the delete button way too soon when deleting that 100^th email from your Inbox. Suddenly, you realize that your boss’ request to put the finishing touches on that huge project that you’ve been working on was the 99^th email. But don’t panic. There are ways to recover emails that have been deleted, even permanently. And no, it does not involve your boss resending that very important email again.

Step 1: Check Your Deleted Items Folder

Every Outlook client mailbox comes with a deleted items folder. So any mail items deleted (email, calendar events, appointments, etc.) will always be forwarded to this deleted items folder. This is known as a soft delete.

To recover recently deleted items within the Outlook mailbox, select the Deleted Items folder. Once you are within your deleted items, you can sort by date, sender or type of message to find the mail item that you’re looking for.

But let’s say that you deleted your deleted items. Now what?

Step 2: Recover Deleted Items

MS Outlook client has a Recover Deleted Items Tool that allows you to recover mail items that have been deleted from the deleted items folder. To recover deleted items on the client:

a.       Select the Deleted Items folder,

b.      On the　Tools　menu, click　Recover Deleted Items (this will be under the Folder tab in Outlook 2010)

c.       Highlight the deleted items you wish to recover

d.      Select the Recover Selected Items icon. Your selected items will now be restored to the Deleted Items folder.

Wonderful news, right? But what if you permanently deleted your deleted items? This means that at some point, you held down the shift key while selecting delete, or what’s known as a hard delete. Now your deleted mail items are no longer recoverable from the deleted items folder or by using the Recover Deleted items tool.

Step 3: Recover Deleted Items via Exchange

Most businesses have an MS Exchange environment where email items are retained for at least two weeks before being physically deleted from the Information Store. This is referred to as the Deleted Items Retention Policy. However, these deleted items are hidden from the MS Outlook client and must be recovered by an administrator with Exchange Admin rights. An Exchange Administrator gathers information needed to perform a Single Item Recovery. The Exchange Administrator then searches the "Dumpster" of the mail server. This is where purged or deleted items are located before being physically deleted from the Information Store via the Deleted Items Retention Policy. Once the deleted item is found, a .PST file can be created containing the missing mail items. The .pst file is then imported into the user’s mailbox, thus restoring the missing email.

Step 4: Exchange Backups

Last but not least, is the option to restore a user’s email using a Point-in-Time recovery Exchange Restore. Stick around for my next blog as we go through the task of a mailbox restore using a third party backup, restore and archive recovery tool.

Jeronna Freeman  is the Cloud Administrator for JHC Technology.  She can be reached at jfreeman(at)jhctechnology.com or connect with her on LinkedIn.

How to Force Download the Address Book within Outlook 2010

When making a name changes to existing email accounts for Exchange/Outlook users there may be a long delay while the updated information propagates throughout all the servers of your Enterprise.  Here is a quick guide to follow to get the change completed faster.

Perform Task on Exchange Server 2010

After changes within Exchange such as Names change, run script:

Get-OfflineAddressBook | Update-OfflineAddressBook

  

Perform Task on Outlook Mailbox:

The Name change has been completed from within the Exchange server but not fully populated throughout all Outlook mail accounts.  In order to force your Outlook to update now, follow these steps.  Otherwise the user will have to wait until all of the servers update taking over a 24 hour time frame.

To force a full download of the address book

1. Start Outlook, click
2. Tools, click
3. Send/Receive, and then click
4. Download Address Book

This process may take a while to complete.  There will be a progress window and once completed, you should have finalized the forced download.

Wanda Bannerman is the Mobile Architect for JHC Technology.  She can be reached at wbannerman(at)jhctechnology.com.