Learning Azure and Office 365

Looking at the customer base demand in terms what public cloud seems to be the more popular – it becomes obvious that Microsoft Enterprise Agreement include a lot of cloud credits and allow straightforward decision on public cloud technology to be used by Microsoft's customers base.

Most time of the last week and a little bit this week I was getting up to speed with Microsoft Public Cloud Offerings.

Here is the summary of the resources I used so far:

•       Interactive overview of Azure Datacenter – a bit too much marketing but you can find number of valuable points around building datacenter 
•       If you’d like to get certified on Office 365 or/and Azure – the details of certification exams required can be found here
•           Significant number of free interactive classes can be found here 
•           Personally I took “Microsoft Azure for AWS Experts” (AZURE213x) which has awesome 5 series videos that can be accessed directly from MS Blog 
•          There is a lot of paid classes offered however "99995MOD: First Look Clinic: Microsoft Azure (On Demand)" is offered for free and a little bit above Level 100 (Sometime 200-300) which makes it really useful – allow around 8 hours to complete it. 
•          I started looking at Office 365 – which seems to be the most widely implemented part of Azure – there is number of video training here (a bit outdated but still relevant) on Virtual Academy (but the instructors are brilliant!)
•          Also for Enterprises – you can try Office 365for free 
•      Azure offers $250 Credit, however you have 30 days to spend it…. 

Hopefully it’s helpful list of resources. On another note I’m continue enjoying summer and working part time on short-term contract as a Principal Security Consultant for one of Vancouver local businesses. I expect it will help me with sharpening my Python scripting skills as SEIM, IDS/IPS and other technologies that I’ve not touched recently.