Articles

Dipping into Azure DNS with Men&Mice DDI solutions

Not everyone is ready to ‘go’ cloud.

Mar 8th, 2016

It’s snowing. Still. One could be excused for dreaming of azure blue skies scattered across azure blue oceans. Instead, the Men&Mice team is making do with a whole other Azure - Microsoft’s nifty cloud platform.

Though Microsoft’s Azure doesn’t come with cocktails on the beach, it definitely brings another dimension to the world of IT. And who are we to say no to that?

Not everyone is ready to ‘go’ cloud. Some organizations that host specifically sensitive data, such as in healthcare, for instance, are somewhat more reluctant to take the leap. Many others dive in wholeheartedly, making large parts of their operations, or even their entire enterprise, -aaS compatible by adopting platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS) or transforming their servers, storage and networking into infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

The saying goes that there’s more than one way to skin a cat, and there’s certainly more than one way to go cloud. The most basic division is private and public, basically meaning you want to keep yourself to yourself in a private cloud (on-premise, hosted or both) or you don’t mind sharing infrastructure in a public cloud. And for those who don’t want to limit themselves to one or the other and prefer to use a mix of on-premise, virtual private and public options, there’s the hybrid cloud, straddling the best of both worlds.

Under all the private, public, virtual and on-premise versions of all the -aaS, there is a vast variety of applications, services, software and hardware offered by a large number of vendors. If you were to put your computing snorkel on and break the surface of this world of the cloud, there’s sure to be an array of IT wonders to be tried, tested and discovered – if you are that way inclined.

Even so, not everyone is blown away by the cloud – its beginnings can best be described as rather tentative – and not everyone is ready to jump on board. Yet there’s no denying that both business operations and IT business solutions are drifting towards the cloud at great speed. IDC, the market research company, projects growth in public and private cloud storage to go from 29% of the total market in 2014 to 60% by 2019. Carla Arend, IDC’s Program Director for European Storage and Cloud Research, was recently quoted as saying that “85% of new enterprise applications are developed for the cloud, while legacy applications are gradually migrating to cloud-hosted virtual machines and/or containers.”

We at Men&Mice are not here to tell our customers whether they should go cloud, or, if they do, which degree or combination of cloud-hosting they should choose. We do, however, feel our customers should have the freedom to explore cloud computing safe in the knowledge that the Men&Mice Suite will serve as their dedicated DDI sidekick during their cloud adventures.

To simplify our customers’ freedom of choice, the latest version of the Men&Mice Suite, Version 7.1 (released in January 2016), includes full support for Microsoft Azure DNS. This next step in cloud dexterity comes on top of support for AWS Amazon Route 53, which was already added to the Suite in 2014. Follow this link for instructions on how to configure an Azure DNS connector through the Men&Mice Suite. More information on Azure DNS can be obtained here.

So there you have it. Snow or no snow, cloud or no cloud, blue skies or no skies, at least we can safely say that the Men&Mice Suite is seeing in the virtual realties of 2016 completely Azure-sure.

Cheers to that!