Chapter 17

When to Use Azure Versus Office 365

What’s In This Chapter

• The flexibility of each service
• Azure and Office 365 identity federation
• How each service handles identity federation
• The productivity features each service offers
• Understanding cross-platform considerations
• What you can expect with the service-level agreement
• The development tools you can use with each service

Both Microsoft Azure and Office 365 are Microsoft cloud-based service offerings that cater toward different business needs. Microsoft Azure essentially provides IaaS and PaaS service offerings, which makes it a broader cloud platform. Office 365 is basically a SaaS offering which provides features such as collaboration, messaging, and communication. The sections in this chapter cover various facets of each service, so you know how to use each appropriately. Figure 17-1 illustrates how the two services differ.

Figure 17-1

Which Service is More Flexible?

Microsoft Azure enables businesses to develop, deploy, and scale cloud-based solutions with different agility needs. With Azure you get the flexibility to choose the technology on which to build solutions (for example, PHP, ASP.NET, and so on) and you can also easily scale your solutions both up and down based on your needs (for example, using different number of worker roles at different times).

With Office 365 you get relatively less flexibility to choose technology—all the offered services are based on Microsoft Products and Technologies. Also, Office 365 services are streamlined to suit specific needs such as messaging, collaboration, and communication. Microsoft enables limited customization for most of its Office 365 service offerings, so if you look forward to building or migrating existing solutions to the cloud, Azure provides broader options. On the other hand, if the majority of your business requirements are met by SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Lync Online services, you may opt for them rather than reinventing the wheel and developing features already provided by these services. For more details on the Office 365 service offerings, visit www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=13602.

Although Azure and Office 365 offers different degree of flexibility, there is no reason not to integrate them—they don’t need to be mutually exclusive. In fact there are numerous scenarios where a business might actually require features from both Azure and Office 365. For example, consider a scenario where your business stores customer support tickets on SQL Azure but you need to manage these tickets through a corporate portal based on SharePoint Online. By using Business Connectivity Services—a feature of SharePoint Online, you can perform CRUD (Create/Edit/Update/Delete) operations on relevant tables in SQL Azure using SharePoint Online.

How Does Each Service Handle Identity Federation?

Identity federation is an authentication mechanism that enables organizations to perform single sign on and cross-domain sign in using an authentication mechanism of choice. Identity federation is quite common these days, and most businesses want it as part of their basic service offering. Microsoft Azure provides identity federation through its Access Control Service (ACS) feature. When customers subscribe to the Microsoft Azure service, ACS is available at no additional charge. With ACS, users can authenticate using their Live, Facebook, Yahoo, and Gmail accounts without doing any development to authenticate against these providers; Azure has already done the hard work behind the scenes. Office 365 also supports identity federation by using Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) on-premise. However, ADFS requires you to set up and maintain this on the on-premise server, which means you carry the extra cost of hardware, software, and performing maintenance and upgrades.

You also need to ensure that ADFS and Active Directory and Domain Controller are all properly licensed on-premises. Licensing can also quickly get complicated depending on the size of organization and usage of particular features. You must not take this lightly; at the end of the day, it’s licensing that legitimizes the use of these products.

What Productivity Tools Does Each Offer?

Productivity tools help users to perform their day-to-day tasks with the least amount of effort. Microsoft is famous for its productivity tools. The Microsoft Office suite is a good example of this; it brings applications, such as Word and Excel, to the end users and is one of the most commonly used tools on the market today.

Microsoft Office 365 supports the latest version of Microsoft Office suite (included as part of its Enterprise subscription plans). For example, if a business chooses to adopt Office 365, there is an almost flat learning curve when using Microsoft Office suite. Microsoft Azure does not offer the Microsoft Office suite when you subscribe to its services. That does not mean that you cannot use it with Microsoft Azure; for example, if you choose to implement a custom content management solution, you can store Office documents on Azure. However, the overall experience is much different from Office 365. Azure does not provide advance features such as document co-authoring, online viewing, and editing of documents. Similarly, features such as document check-in, versioning, and so on are also absent.

How Does Each Handle Cross-Platform Support

Cross-platform support is another important area of consideration for many organizations as they evaluate cloud-based platforms. For the most part, cloud-based services are consumed using web browsers, which enable border platform support. For example, most websites eventually render on a browser as HTML regardless of the technology used to build these websites. This makes it much easier to target a wide user base with different operating systems and browsers. Because you can build and deploy a wide range of solutions using Microsoft Azure, the nature of those solutions determines what features you offer; many features may not be available or fully functional across all the platforms. With Office 365, only certain features work with Microsoft Windows; others have more limited functionality depending on the user choice of a browser. Also, tools, such as SharePoint Workspace, SharePoint Designer, and the like are only supported on Microsoft Windows.

How Do Service-Level Agreements Work?

For legal and operational purposes, a vendor must provide a service-level agreement (SLA) to define its operational commitment to a business that will consume its cloud services. Much like most IaaS and PaaS offerings, Microsoft Azure provides 99.9 percent availability as part of its SLA for most of its services at the platform level. However, because these offerings by definition require custom development, the final availability depends on the specific solution you develop and deploy, so you need to plan and test for this explicitly.

Office 365 also provides 99.9 percent availability as part of its SLA. Because it’s a SaaS offering, the degree of customizations to its services are limited in scope. For example, SharePoint Online only supports deployment of its custom server-side solutions in the form of Sandboxed Solutions. Exchange Online and Lync Online do not enable custom server-side solutions at all. For small businesses with limited resources to develop, deploy, and manage custom solutions, Office 365 is a great option because it offers services with baked-in communication, messaging, and collaboration features; Microsoft takes care of feature availability as part of standard SLA.

What Development Tools Do Azure and Office 365 Support?

Developers can expect to enjoy great tool support and powerful API programming tools with both Microsoft Azure and Office 365.

Microsoft Azure provides developers the following:

• The platform to build and deploy applications from scratch. This includes a variety of technologies including PHP, .NET, and Java.
• SDKs for a variety of technologies. Microsoft did a remarkable job with this.
• A seamless development experience. Developers who are already familiar with Visual Studio will notice that after the SDK is installed, Azure templates become available immediately and relevant emulators, for example, compute, storage and so on, are installed on local workstation. This allows developers to test and debug their solutions locally without the need to connect to Azure Platform.
• SQL Azure allows developers to work with a database engine in a similar way they use on-premise SQL Server. Again, developers can leverage all their existing knowledge and skillset related to the database programming because there are only slight differences between the SQL Azure and SQL Server from the developer’s prospective.
• Azure provides reliable and secure messaging relay functionality in the form of Server Bus. Developers can utilize Service Bus to build applications that are decoupled and highly scalable.
• By using Azure Connect, developers can build applications that can be hosted in hybrid environments. For example, you can host custom solution on Azure and connect to SQL Server, which resides on-premises. Also, using Azure Connect, developers can perform remote debugging by connecting to applications hosted on Azure using a local machine. This aids developers in debugging and troubleshooting hosted applications in the real time rather than using emulators on the local machine.

The Office 365 development is slightly different because it is essentially a combination of many different services. There is no single Office 365 SDK that developers can download. You can’t start building the solutions for all the Office 365 services. For example, Exchange Online development requires you to install the Exchange Managed API, which then enables developers to connect and program against Exchange API; the same is true for Lync Online. SharePoint Online templates do get installed as part of Visual Studio installation, so there is no need to install them separately.

Comparison of Azure and Office 365

Although, conducting a holistic comparison between Azure and Office 365 is beyond the scope of this chapter, Table 17-1 provides a side by side comparison of Azure and Office 365.

Table 17-1: Comparison of Azure and Office 365

Summary

This chapter covers factors that help you determine when it’s best to use Microsoft Azure and when it’s best to use Office 365. Although each factor plays a different role in the decision-making process, you should carefully consider each factor with equal importance. Flexibility of the cloud platform and SLAs are critical for businesses because they impact the operations and future vision. Productivity tools and cross-platform support impacts end users as they perform day-to-day operations. Finally, development tools support for cloud-based services is important for developers who build custom solutions and customize existing services to meet their business needs.