FAQ podcasts are shorter and more focused on a particular topic. In this episode I’ll talk about Azure Sentinel.
This episode was recorded using Microsoft Teams and produced with Camtasia 2019
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Transcription
Welcome along to this episode of The Need to Know podcast My name is Robert Crane and we are at Episode 235 and four to 35. We are going to do a FAQ so there’s we FAQ number eight FAQs are shorter deep dive look into technology. processes, and so on rather than our extended format of news and interviews. So hopefully, I’ll be able to get across my intention here in about 15 minutes or so. So as always, appreciate any feedback, any comments that you have what you’d like me to present in these shorter areas. And if you haven’t heard an FAQ, go back and have a look at the previous episodes. So what I’m going to talk about in this FAQ is a rule of thumb or is a number of rules of thumb that you should have, when you look about moving to the cloud. Now, Robert has a rule of three, my rule of three basically is a governing rule, other use in many, many circumstances. So let me give you an example of way. So when you do adoption, or when you work with users my experience is is that most users struggle to manage any more than three changes at a time. So for example, if you implement Microsoft 365 for a customer, and you introduced them to OneDrive, you introduced them to teams you introduced them. to SharePoint and then you try and introduce something else, maybe the email move to the cloud as well, you’re gonna have a lot of them. Now as soon as you overload them, what happens is there is catastrophic failure. So think of it like juggling balls, if you’ve got one ball easy to do two bit challenging three, yes, this is probably the limit. When I give the person four balls to juggle, they don’t just reject the fourth ball I throw at them, they will drop all the others as well. So this is what we see when we do adoption is that people, when they’re overloaded, they basically have catastrophic failure. And they reject everything. So once you start overloading and those are not at all bad, I don’t want to hear about it. I just want to take it back to the way it used to be. So again, my advice is that when you’re looking at adoption, think about the number of changes that you bring to people to again, allow them to digest it, and move on to start with three maybe that’s in my case, OneDrive. Yammer, and then maybe potentially start talking to them about teams, and then leave it let it settle down. Let them get familiar with Understand the tools, then come back, and then maybe look at doing communication sites, or then Power BI or power automate, and they leave it and then go on to the next three. So you need to look at this as an extended process because people just cannot digest the amount of change in such a short period of time generally. So Robert’s rule of three is don’t overload your users with too much change to quickly look at it as a process of small bites incrementing and improving over time, to allow users to build on that knowledge so they can move forward easily and competently without feeling that it’s too much for them to head on. They don’t understand it before moving to the next step. Now, where else can the rule of three be applied? Well, basically, one of the other rules I like to try and achieve is to have a structure that is no more than three layers deep. So if you think about a team, so you will have a team that will be level one, a channel inside the team is level two, and then a folder or a subfolder within files within a team would be realise now, if you can avoid going deeper than that, that’s great. That should be the ultimate aim best practice to aim for that may not be possible 100% understand that. But the reason is, is that very deep structures, as I have spoken about before, become extremely difficult to navigate for many users who aren’t familiar with that structure. So they go into the location, they go up and down folders all day looking for files. So if we can keep these as flat as possible, and basically when I look at my file structure within a team, what I want to see is the files at that level or the folders and again, the folders need to be categorised in such a way that they’re obvious for me to see what they are. So again, if I have a folder within a folder, then at that top level, I can’t see what that sub folder is, again, all about so that makes it difficult means I have to go in and navigate in and then navigate out again, to see whether the information is there. I mean, obviously search is the way to do it. But again, if you can try And stick to some sort of rule about the maximum depth. Now the other advantage of setting a maximum depth level depth level is that you don’t exceed the URL limit. So as we go deeper and deeper and deeper into structures, obviously the URL, the length of the file path increases, increases, increases. And that becomes more and more difficult to work with it also becomes more difficult to Structure and Change if we need to. So again, Robert, rule three is try and as much as you can keep the depth of your structure to no more than three levels. All right, so that will should make things easy for people to work with. Now, if you’re out there with packages and you’re offering and you’re providing things to users, again, Robert’s rule three would apply as gold, silver, bronze or package one package to package three don’t overload people with too many options. So if we look at the Microsoft 365 environment, they have recently gone to a change And incorporated basically Microsoft 365, basic, Microsoft 365 standard and Microsoft 365.
Premium. Okay, so the idea here is, is that we now have business plans that are Business Standard, business, basic and also business premium. Now again, Robert’s rule of three applies here as well, we’ve seen that just keep it simple. So again, you can go to the user initial and say what about business? Basic, not good enough, doesn’t have the desktop implementations or we can go then up to Business Standard, or we can go up to business premium. So you’ll see a lot of this I think, in other strategies that larger businesses use because, again, we don’t want to overload customers with again, too much choice. They certainly need an amount of choice but I would suggest again, we get cognitive overload when we go beyond the normal three choices. So again, if you can try and keep your offerings to around Another one I’ve got for you is around bandwidth. Now one of the most important things that you can do when you go implement the cloud for customers or you’re looking to move to the cloud yourself is to estimate the bandwidth you’re going to need. Now, hopefully everybody appreciates that. ADSL basically, is isometric, which means the download limit is far greater than the upload limit. So typically ADSL uploads are about point five or point six of a meg up. And that really isn’t adequate for a large amount of users. So again, I’ve got a rule of thumb that basically says, I have low medium and high usages. So again, that sort of depends on if they’re using OneDrive extensively doing lots of sinking if they’re working totally in the cloud, or they do have some on prem. So Robert’s rule of thumb for this is basically you would need or you would estimate to need about half a meg per user for loads usage, one Meg per user for medium usage and to me per user for high usage. So if we take an average company that may be 10 employees, that would mean it would be half a meg times 10. So that will be a five Meg, link up. All right, so they have as much as they want down. That’s not a problem. But the most important thing when you’re looking at the cloud and cloud usage is that link the speed back up to the data centre. So importantly, the estimate that I have used as a rule of thumb is basically as I said, half a meg for low usage, typically, the majority is more on prem, a one Meg, per user, for a medium. So that’s going to be typical business that is moving a lot of their stuff to the cloud. They’re using OneDrive, they’re using SharePoint, they’re using teams, but maybe still have some on prem applications or data. And the final one would be at least two Meg per user, for basically everybody for everybody with everything in the cloud. So again, take that example with 10 users. Multiply that by two Make. So we’re going to need a 20 meg link up back into the internet to allow people to work effectively. Now, of course, you can vary that link those speeds, but it helps to have that rule of thumb so you can walk into a business. Or you can assess it and say, Okay, we’ve got 20 users, and we expect it to start out as low usage. But eventually we’re going to get up to high usage. So why don’t we go for a more powerful link to start off with? So the recommendation I’ve got here for you is that sit back and have a think based on your experience, you know, what sort of guiding principles or rules of thumb Can you give people to help them make estimations when moving to this cloud environment. So again, just in summary, minor, typically everything around a number three. So firstly, again, don’t overload people with more than three changes at a time look at it as a process of three changes, pause, three changes, pause, three changes, pause, and then also look at it as no more than three levels deep. That makes navigation much easier. Any offering any packaging, whatever. Again, gold, silver, bronze, three options again make it easy for people. And as I also said there with the bandwidth, three options there look at low, medium high, and it’s not perfect you can adjust it you can make whatever you want but it just gives you that ability to do the back of the envelope calculation or thought process when you’re working this sort of thing out rather than having to wonder about it. So hopefully, that’s given you some sort of guidance there. Remember, make up your own rule whatever works for you. But I have a rule for you which I generally apply in a lot of cases and I find that works very very well. So again, so if you do want to contact a stay with stay in tune with what’s happening on the podcast, make sure you visit at into k podcast on Twitter and Facebook. Feedback at need to know cloud. Again you can find me at director CIA welcome any comments, feedback or suggestions you may have for these sort of episodes that are a little A bit more in depth I suppose, but shorter lead to get through your drive and get through your day. So, with that, thank you very much for listening listening to this episode.
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