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Archive for April, 2021

Breakout Rooms and Its Usage – Microsoft Teams

Posted on April 18th, 2021 by admin@mismo2023

In this blog, we are going to discuss a feature provided by Microsoft teams known as Breakout rooms. Also, we will focus on how we can create and manage it with a proper set of procedures. To be able for this feature to work seamlessly you must be the meeting organizer and use the Teams, desktop client, to access the breakout rooms option and to manage breakout rooms and participants.

If you want to use breakout rooms, you will either need to start a Meet Now meeting in a channel or calendar or schedule a private meeting with selected participants or a channel. Calls from chat interfaces do not support this feature as they are not considered meetings.

Context

  • Breakout Room Purpose and Need.
  • Using a Breakout Room

Breakout Room Purpose and Need:

Basically, a breakout room is a feature in Team meetings where a private room can be added inside the main meeting which the users can join and communicate. It allows a group of users to communicate with each other while the main meeting is ongoing.

This helps the group of users to save time and energy in creating another meeting and adding designated users in it and further joining back the main meeting back. The meeting organizer can create up to 50 breakout rooms and choose to assign participants automatically or manually into rooms.

An example that will simplify the concept of having this feature – let us say there is an organization that is inviting its different employee teams/groups for a meeting. In the meeting, they will discuss project ideas from different teams/groups.

Now traditionally if we implement this scenario, the solution to this will be first to create the main meeting room where all the tasks for each team must be discussed. Then these teams will start their own respective meeting to discuss project ideas. So, if there are 25 teams then 25 new meetings will be started which can result in mismanagement and more overload.

Now using breakout rooms in teams this can be done in few minutes and with barely any overload as well it is easily manageable. Admin can create 25 breakout rooms which will be there in the main meeting itself and the admin can monitor activities in the rooms easily including other features too.

 How to create and manage breakout rooms:

Let us start with the prerequisites, and it is quite simple. You need a private team in Microsoft Teams. Breakout rooms cannot be set up before a meeting and must be created after the meeting has started. 

Note: It is recommended NOT to invite participants until all the preparations are done. It can cause lots of calendar pop-ups for invitations in the meeting which would be a bit annoying for the participants.

 The breakout room icon is located on the meeting menu between the reactions control and the ellipsis that reveals additional actions.

  1. Join your meeting from the Teams desktop client.
  2. Once the meeting has started, select the breakout room icon.
  3. In the pop-up settings window, select the number of breakout rooms you want to create and how participants will be assigned:
    • Automatically – participants who have already joined the meeting will be assigned into equal-sized rooms. Participants who join the meeting after automatic allocation will need to be assigned manually.
    • Manually – allows you to assign participants to rooms as you choose.
  1. Select Create rooms button. A menu will appear to the right of your Teams meeting window displaying room management options, room titles, participants, and status of your breakout rooms and participants.
  1. To manually create additional rooms, select Add room.
  2. To assign/move a participant, select the closed room where the participant is currently assigned. Check the boxes next to the names of the participants you want to move. Select Assign and choose any room you want to place them in.

Note: The participants joining via a desk phone or Teams mobile app cannot be assigned and will remain in the main meeting.

  1. To edit the title of a room or delete it, hover over the status icon next to the room title:
  2. Rename room: Change the title of the selected room. It is recommended to create a specific title as the chat log remains accessible for participants after the meeting.
  3. Delete room: Remove the selected room. Any assigned participants will be moved to the list of unassigned participants. To open additional overarching room settings, select the ellipsis icon next to the Breakout rooms heading, and chose rooms settings while all rooms are closed:
  4. Automatically move people into opened rooms – select to move participants automatically in and out of their assigned rooms when you open or close the breakout rooms. Participants will receive a notification that they will be moved automatically with 10-second notice.
  5. Let people go back to the main meeting: select to allow participants to move between the main meeting and their assigned breakout room when the breakout rooms are open. If this option is not selected, participants will be able to move back into the main meeting by selecting Return, or back to the breakout room by selecting Join room.

Note: It is not possible for participants to switch between breakout rooms unless the meeting organizer has assigned them a new room.

  • Recreate rooms: delete all current rooms and settings to start from the beginning.
  • Make an Announcement: Organizers can send announcements to the breakout rooms and recall all participants back to the main meeting at any time.

When you are satisfied with the breakout rooms allocations and settings, you need to open the rooms to allow participants to access them.

  • To open all the rooms at once, select Start rooms. The status icon next to the rooms will change from Closed to Open.
  • To open individual rooms, hover over the Closed status icon of the room and select the ellipsis icon. Select Open.
  • When participants are in the breakout room, in meeting displays beside their name. If this status is not shown beside a name, you can prompt the participant to enter the breakout room by selecting their name and Ask to join.

You will be added to the breakout room and can interact with all features of the meeting.

  • While you are in a breakout room, you will be On Hold in the main meeting and will not be able to see if participants have entered the main meeting until you return to the main meeting.
  • Select the Leave button to leave the breakout room and return to the main meeting.

At the end of the meeting, you can either leave your breakout rooms open or closed.

  • Open: Allows participants to continue collaborating to the breakout room chat and re-open the breakout room meeting after the main meeting has ended. If the meeting is recurring, your breakout room settings and allocations are saved and maintained for subsequent meetings.
  • Closed: Breakout room chats become read-only for all participants after the meeting has ended and cannot be re-opened. Breakout room settings and allocations are not saved for subsequent meetings.

Have any questions? Let us know in the comments section below. Thanks for reading!

Is Cloud cheaper than On-premises Data Centres?

Posted on April 12th, 2021 by admin@mismo2023

Cloud has bloomed over the last decade, according to Goldman’s analysts almost 23% of IT workloads now live on Public clouds, and expected to reach 45% in the next 4 years, with the cloud service market reaching a valuation of $1 trillion.

What is the driving force behind this immense growth?

The major factors are Cost, Security, and Accessibility. Cost is the main factor that most of the enterprise consider before making any decision. IT workloads can either be on Cloud or on-prem Data Centres.

On-Prem Data Centres: On-premises data centres are a group of privately owned & controlled servers. It is based on Capex (Capital Expenditure) model which means the enterprise must require in-house server hardware, software licenses, integration capabilities, and an in-house IT team to control, administer and maintain the data centre and resolve potential issues that may arise. This does not even factor in the amount of maintenance that an enterprise is responsible for when something breaks or does not work. Enterprise with a huge growth potential must also factor in the cost of future upgrades, which are going to be needed with increased workloads.

Cloud: Cloud works on Opex (Operational expense) model which means a third-party provider owns the infrastructure which includes hardware & software and enterprises can subscribe to services and manage their account over the internet, this allows enterprises to pay on an As-Needed basis and effectively scale up or down depending upon overall usage and user requirements.

(Read More:- A quick look at the 4 Most Used Services on Microsoft Azure)

Following are some of the parameters to compare the cost of both:

Infrastructure: – Since the on-prem data centre is a Capex which means enterprise must spend a huge sum of money on hardware, software licensing, data backup, IT staff, and space for the housing data centre. In cloud computing a third-party CSP pays for all of these and enterprises can choose from monthly or annual subscriptions. So, on-prem have an enormous upfront cost and cloud computing has none.

Compliance: – Enterprises in the health and finance sectors must be compliant with HIPPA, CCPA, etc. Enterprises having on-prem data centres need to recruit staff with proper knowledge about regulations to take care of compliance-related matters. Servers need to be properly configured and maintained to stay compliant, if something went wrong then the whole burden falls on the enterprise itself. Unlike on-prem, Cloud providers (Amazon, Microsoft, Google) spend a huge sum of money to stay compliant. Although the responsibility will be yours if your CSP is not compliant, you can trust the word of big CSP’s like Microsoft, AWS, Google Cloud, etc

Backup: – Enterprises having on-prem data centres are more prone to data loss because data is stored in internal servers and backup as well. Many enterprises choose to use cloud services for data backup even after having on-prem data centres, which is an overhead for enterprises. Enterprises are offered various services to avoid data loss in the cloud such as redundancy (LRS, GRS, and ZRS), retention policy, snapshots, etc. Data is everything nowadays so losing data could be a huge cost for enterprises.

Deployment: – Deployment cost is something that must be born in both solutions. Although Cloud deployment costs can be lower by outsourcing the deployment service to a CSP partner which is specialized in doing so.

Scalability: – Scaling up or down according to your workloads in on-prem requires capital, time, and manpower, however, it can be done with just a few clicks and at a comparatively lesser cost.

Monthly Management: – When it comes to operating costs in on-prem, it is somewhat fixed. It includes rent for space, electricity cost, and in-house IT staff salaries. In Cloud, you can outsource the management of cloud servers to a CSP partner at a significantly less cost.

If you still have questions about whether cloud computing is a solution to your complex IT problems? Call Mismo Systems today!

Amazon CloudFront

Posted on April 4th, 2021 by admin@mismo2023

Amazon CloudFront is a brisk Content Delivery Network (CDN) service that safely transfers data, videos, applications, and Application Programming Interface (APIs) to patrons all around the world with low latency, high transfer speeds, in an environment that is developer-friendly.
CloudFront is amalgamated with AWS- both are physical locations directly linked to the AWS global infrastructure, plus other services provided by AWS.


Cloud Front works immaculately with services like AWS Shield for DDoS mitigation, Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing, or Amazon EC2 as starters for your applications, & Lambda@Edge to run very specialized codes that are closer to customers’ users and to have a very specific tailor-made experience.

In the end, using AWS origins like Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, or Elastic Load Balancing, won’t cost you anything for transferring data between them and CloudFront.

It would literally take a few minutes to get started with CDN, and you only have to use the AWS tools that you are familiar with already, like APIs, AWS Management Console, AWS CloudFormation, CLIs, and SDKs. The CDN of Amazon provides a straightforward, pay-as-you-go model of pricing and has the benefits of no upfront price or any long-time bonds. The customer care support for the CDN is a part of your existing AWS support subscription.

Benefits:


1) Swift and comprehensive:
The Amazon CDN is based on a very large scale and is internationally spread. The CloudFront network has approximately 220 points of presence (PoPs) and has a considerable grip over the highly sustainable Amazon backbone network for better performance and availability for the company’s consumers.


2) Highly secured network:
The Amazon CloudFront is a very secure CDN that gives protection at two levels: network and application. Your traffic and applications get a lot of added advantages through a wide array of built-in protections like the AWS Shield Standard, with no additional cost. Configurable features like AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) can also be used to manage customer SSL certificates at no added cost.


3) Highly Programmable:
Customization of the features of Amazon CloudFront as per your requirements is quite simple. Lambda@Edge functions, which are triggered by the events of CloudFront, expand your customer code across AWS locations globally, allowing you to re-locate even complex application logic closer to your consumers to increase responsiveness. Integration with other tools and automation interfaces for today’s DevOps and CI/CD environment by the application of native APIs/AWS tools is also supported by AWS.


4) A profound integration with AWS:
The AWS services like Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Route S3, and the AWS Elemental Media services are integrated with the Amazon CloudFront. They are all present with the same console and all the attributes in the CDN can be configured programmatically with the help of APIs or the AWS Management Console.

Mismo Systems is a Cloud Solutions Provider – A team of enthusiastic professionals, who love & live technology, providing highly innovative IT solutions that will add value to your business.

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Hosting with Transparency, Compliance, and Security

Posted on April 4th, 2021 by admin@mismo2023

We help customers host applications on the cloud, this includes accounting systems including Tally, ERP software including SAP, and Navision. We host workloads only with leading public cloud providers which are Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

We ensure that the solution is compliant from the licensing standpoint of both cloud providers (e.g., Microsoft) and business systems (e.g., Tally or NAV). We ensure that the system is secure and there’s no open access by implementing VPN and implementing backups.

All these services are fully managed. We perform regular monitoring of system performance, continuously evaluating the security posture, patching systems every month, and perform regular restore drills. And all this is proactive and there have been instances where we approached customers to reduce the server config (and hence reducing the cost) because of less load than expected. That is the beauty of Pay as You Go (PAYG).

I come across a question often from my team that our solution is costlier and also while discussing with customers that we are getting it at a much cheaper price than you are offering then why we should host with you. This bothered me and I decided to find out why our cost is higher than the so-called competition. I took help from one of the potential customers and spoke to the competition. And the following is what I found was making us costlier.

  • Competition is using a remote access solution that is not compliant as per cloud or license provider licensing terms. You ask them about it, and they will have no answer. Test it out!
  • They are not providing a VPN and the system is open from anywhere. They claim to have a firewall and antivirus but keeping your accounting system open to the whole world is a clear no-no from a business owner perspective.
  • They have got into a contract with a third-party data center provider and will give you a server. Your contract is with them and not with the datacenter. There’s no direct control or visibility and shifting to another provider will be a nightmare.
  • We enable you to host with major public cloud providers and the contract is between you and the cloud provider. You are the owner of the account. With the portal of Public Cloud, you can see your server and control it and even kick us out if we underperform and onboard another service provider. Think of the visibility and control you have. If I am a business owner, I cannot let my business systems under someone else’s control.
  • We provide proactive managed services, so your systems are always running and secure with a data backup which is tested regularly.
  • They give a fixed cost per user, our model is PAYG, so you can scale up or down easily.

I hope this gives us and our customers visibility of what you get when you host with us and what you lose when you host with a low-cost provider.

Future of Cloud Computing

Posted on April 4th, 2021 by admin@mismo2023

Cloud computing has established itself as the inevitable future when it comes to IT services. This picture becomes much clearer when we take a glimpse at some of the prominent cloud statistics such as, “one-third of companies’ total IT budget is allocated to cloud services” or Cisco’s statement saying that “94% of the world’s workload will be run on the cloud by 2021”.

If we take a brief look at the road that cloud computing has traveled so far, we can find that the concept first came into being in DARPA’s (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) quest of developing a breakthrough technology that allows a “computer to be used by two or more people, simultaneously” in 1963.

As soon as the late 1990s came the years when Salesforce took a huge direction and giving rise to a whole new way of providing services to the globe i.e., SaaS (Software as a Service) when they made available their application to anybody with just an internet connection.

Since then, cloud computing has become a behemoth of a platform, far-reaching the imaginations of its progenitors, taking its modern form in 2006 when Amazon came up with AWS (Amazon web services) offering a fleet of VMs dubbed as EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing).

At present, there is a multitude of major players in this segment starting from Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform to IBM Bluemix and Alibaba. All having their unique specialty and benefits.

Now that we have covered the ground of the cloud’s existence so far, let’s get back to the future. SaaS seems to be the ultimate stop for any IT offering and the statistics solidifying this argument is the latest forecast from Gartner, which predicts the SaaS revenue to be $113 Billion and some change just for 2021, higher than any other form of cloud offering. This surge can be seen not only in SaaS but in IaaS and PaaS as well.

The trust in the cloud is so profound at the present and strengthening by the day so much so that organizations feel highly confident in moving all of the Infra to the cloud, making it the fastest-growing service with ‘Cumulative Annual Growth Rate (CAGR)’ of 33.7%.

With the cloud offering a highly agile and flexible landscape, organizations are making the best of various strategies while moving to the cloud. One of the most popular ones being the hybrid cloud, which is the best of both worlds – Private and Public Cloud with 84% of the enterprise making use of this strategy.

It’s clear, looking at the picture above that cloud will come with various innovations as we go along and how companies make use of it will be equally interesting to watch. The stage has been set for the unprecedented level of modernization across the globe. We all as earthlings are set to reap benefits from this technologically revolutionary and green campaign and once more we all get the opportunity to bear witness to the future unfolding right in front of us.

Read more blogs from Mismo Systems here.

AWS Security Features

Posted on April 4th, 2021 by admin@mismo2023

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) in terms of security follow a shared responsibility model. So, the security ‘of’ the cloud is on the shoulders of AWS, whereas you and your organization’s development team have to look after the security “in” the cloud. Hence, the protection of the infrastructure of the cloud, including hardware, software, and networking falls under the territory of AWS. All the other security objectives, including access to your AWS resources and the security of your application, is your responsibility. The following is an overview of four of the most common AWS security features you’ll need to keep your cloud secure.

1. S3 Security

S3 stands for Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, which is responsible for providing data storage with a high level of availability & durability. Just like all AWS services, the S3 by default denies access from most sources. Only the bucket and object owners (the AWS account owner) have read/write access by default. Hence, it becomes important to lock your S3 buckets so that no unauthorized users are able to view, upload, or delete your files. Contrary to other services, there are several ways of adding permissions to S3, like:

  • Firstly, by giving IAM roles to your hand-picked users within your AWS account. They can be used to specify what the users are allowed to do, and how many of them have access to it?
  • Usage of Bucket Policies to lock down a single bucket. There is an option of adding permissions to either the individual users or the entire AWS accounts. Bucket policies can be helpful if some files in your application are public and some are private.
  • Use of Access Control Lists (ACL) to gain access for AWS accounts & not the individual users. These become very helpful when your company is in possession of & uses several AWS accounts or if any other organization needs access to your files.

2. Identity Access Management (IAM)

The IAM is a free-of-cost element of the AWS that allows you to control & manage- ‘what users have access to what services and resources. By default, access to resources is generally denied, so you will have to grant users permissions in IAM. Permissions are incredibly comminuted and allow you to specify the particular file or resources that a user can access, what the things are that they can do with the file and the work conditions that have to be present for the permissions to get activated – like, using a specific IP address to access AWS. Here are some best practices you should consider with IAM:

  • Granting few privileges- Granting the users only the permissions they need to perform the tasks, and nothing more. This is very beneficial, as you can always grant more permissions, but you cannot obtain the databases that were deleted or removed because you made everyone an admin.
  • Creation of groups- A group can be defined as a lump or collection of users that allows you to specify the various permissions for the concerned users. Because of this, tracking who has what permissions becomes very easy, plus you can add permissions to several users at once. For example, a group called Mismo AWS could be given full control over the AWS, while the other group, i.e., AWS Developers, in this case, may only be given access to Lambda and S3.
  • Enable multi-factor authentication, or MFA, for all users. MFA means that, for a user to sign in, they will have to enter the passcode followed by an additional code that is sent to them through a secondary device, like a smartphone. This is very useful as, even if a user’s password is compromised, their account will not be accessible.

3. Cloud Trail

Your applications are not directly affected by CloudTrail, but it is essentially a tool used for tracking the activity of the users, compliance demonstration, and executing the security analysis. The review activity can also be searched through the logs created by CloudTrail. Overall, it is present by default, so you can view the logs as long as you have an AWS account. CloudTrail is very useful in determining whether your security configuration is sufficient or not? You can view the following from CloudTrail logs:

  • The various updates to AWS services.
  • The IP address source of the API calls.
  • Which account created, deleted, or even modified the different AWS resources.

You can monitor and protect your organization’s digital assets with the built-in features of AWS. You have the power to determine which security features to employ and who has access to them. Your data gets stored securely on the cloud, & your organization’s unique security requirements are still under your control.

4. Security Groups

Elastic Cloud Compute also called EC2, instances are the actual servers on which the applications are run. Each server operates from a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), a virtual network that you have control over. These VPCs have. There are many security groups in VPCs, which may or may not allow the entry of traffic.

In these security groups, you get to choose the traffic that can enter both in and out of your VPC. Security groups, however, are stateful, so if you allowed ‘in’ a request, its response is allowed ‘out’. By default, traffic is denied, so everything gets rejected if it is not specifically allowed ‘in’. It is quite common for all the traffic to be allowed for Outbound traffic (because you are the one who is sending it), but it is important to cut down on the type of inbound traffic that you allow. You can also specify the types of requests (like HTTP, SSH, etc.), the port range, & the source of traffic through these security groups.

For more of such blogs click here.