Azure "cloud office"

[Gareth ACA Accountant]

Hi all,

I run a small business (just me at the moment). All my work is done through my computer, a combination of MS Office and cloud based software packages.

I am looking to scale up, with a combination of staff and outsourced individuals.

What I am looking to do is set up the equivalent of a traditional office IT environment and associated network of PCs where individuals would all work, only done entirely remotely.

The vision I have is a bunch of virtual machines operating on Azure, inside some sort of domain, with the work all stored on some Azure storage, with internet access controlled through a gateway/firewall, group policies established, running a local version of MS Office on the VMs (as in not Office365 or GSuite or some such - won't work for what I need). Probably with a domain controller such as MS Server, or possibly Linux (Zentyl or something similar).

Effectively the same as if your network was in a building and you were all sitting together - only remote.

I'm pretty sure this is possible on Azure (and also likely AWS but I've not investigated it). I'm aware that if you are not careful with Azure you can rip through cash in no time so I need to be a bit careful here.

Does anyone know of any resources to learn more about this. I would likely get a professional to set up and implement, but I would like to know what I am doing and what I need myself, so that I am at least an educated buyer.

I would imagine this is a pretty common brief - "like what would be in an office, but in the cloud..."
At first it would only be 2-3 staff/outsourced individuals, but I would want to build something that could easily scale.

I've had a look at the free trial on Azure, and smashed the free credit by setting up Azure AD and forgetting to switch it off. A useful, if annoying lesson learned.

 

[forevergroup]

An IaaS deployment on Azure is overkill for this.

Use Windows 10 endpoints joined to Azure AD, or Windows 365.

M365 Business Premium.

Endpoint Manager to control them.

Sharepoint Online / OneDrive for storage.

SaaS solutions for Endpoint monitoring, patch management, security/firewall, and DNS/Web security.

You’ll find that almost no-one is building out virtualised DCs and Azure Virtual Desktop endpoints for deployments of this size or even ten times larger.

Done right, M365 Business Premium + Windows 10/11 Pro endpoints + Sharepoint/OneDrive + AAD + Endpoint Manager + Cloud Security is a very compelling ‘office in a box’ solution.

 

[Deleted member 325090]

Assuming you need to do what you've said, it's worth investigating ARM templates and PowerShell scripts. If I was getting a professional to configure this kind of environment for me, I'd want to make sure I could rebuild it from scratch quickly, consistently and without shelling out again for professional assistance.

On Azure you can setup email alerts when your account hits certain monetary limits to try to help you maintain cost controls and avoid nasty shocks. There are also reports which project your month-end spend, which might be useful. If you do ever spend real money by mistake, contact Microsoft for a refund. If you can show it was a mistake and you didn't make use of the resources, in my experience they have been quite helpful.

You do have to be very careful when provisioning cloud resources, either manually or via scripts, because Azure has a friendly habit of provisioning things at the "default" price tier unless you tell it otherwise. And sadly the default tiers are not often the cheapest and can be hugely expensive.

As a general rule, if you do decide to engage a professional to scope this out for you, my advice is to present them with the underlying business problem(s) you're trying to solve and let them suggest some solutions.

It could be that some of the cheaper, simpler options you've ruled out are in fact entirely workable, with a small amount of tweaking, custom development, hybrid cloud architecture etc.

 

[Hooble]

Hello Gareth,

We specialize around this kinda of setup you mention, we have migrated a large number of customers similar to yourselves to a cloud model with their offices and remote workers connected via VPN. Is it something you would like to discuss via DM?