2021.12.14
Year-end 2021: hybrid cloud lessons from a hard twelve months
2021 hybrid cloud lessons: ProxyLogon urgency, AVD rename, SfB Online end, Zero Trust basics, and what Microsoft estates should fund in the year ahead.
2021 field notes.
12 notes from 2021. Product names and recommendations reflect that year — not today's catalog. Current notes (2024–)
Archive
// pre-2024 field notes// 2021 · 12 posts · archive year page
2021// 12 posts
2021.11.16
Exchange Online security posture after a brutal year for mail
Exchange Online security after ProxyLogon year: reduce on-prem surface, MFA, legacy auth, external forwarding, and hybrid server hardening.
2021.10.19
Azure landing zone for mid-market: the minimum that still works
Azure landing zone mid-market minimum: management groups, identity, network hub, policy, and FinOps without enterprise bureaucracy theater.
2021.09.14
Windows 11 and VDI/AVD: what we are testing this fall
Windows 11 VDI and Azure Virtual Desktop testing: hardware readiness, image strategy, FSLogix, and when not to rush multi-session estates.
2021.08.17
Zero Trust for a Microsoft estate: practical steps, not posters
Zero Trust practical steps on Azure AD and Microsoft 365: identity first, legacy auth, device trust, admin tiering — without boiling the ocean.
2021.07.20
Skype for Business Online is gone: the week-after field notes
Skype for Business Online retirement aftermath: residual tickets, hybrid leftovers, rooms still broken, and closing the Teams migration properly.
2021.06.15
Windows Virtual Desktop becomes Azure Virtual Desktop. Five years of VDI, one direction
Azure Virtual Desktop rename and AVD vs WVD: from XenDesktop and RDS through WVD preview and GA to AVD — lessons from a decade of desktop delivery.
2021.05.11
Skype for Business Online's last 90 days: the final migration checklist
Skype for Business Online end of life checklist: 90 days to July 31, 2021 — voice stragglers, rooms, contact centers, assisted upgrade, if you do nothing.
2021.04.13
From SCVMM to Azure: translating a decade of private-cloud skills
SCVMM to Azure skills map: clouds and host groups to subscriptions, templates to ARM/Bicep, orchestration to Automation — what transfers and what to unlearn.
2021.03.09
HAFNIUM and ProxyLogon: a very bad month for on-prem Exchange
HAFNIUM Exchange vulnerability and ProxyLogon response: patch vs mitigate vs isolate, IOC hunting, why hybrid-minimal paid off, the last-server conversation.
2021.02.16
Zero data loss across multi-domain estates: the migration architecture
Zero data loss migration architecture for multi-domain Office 365: inventory as contract, delta-sync cutovers, verification, chain-of-custody for government.
2021.01.19
An honest anatomy of a 35% cost reduction
Cloud migration cost savings analysis: five years of programs — hardware avoidance, licensing, DR, ops hours — and where costs move instead of vanish.