Recently I had the chance to sit down and chat with Richard Campbell of RunAs radio, who posted a recording of the interview on December 7. The topic of the interview was the current state of play with Office 365, who’s moving to it, what the impact of the August and September outages has been on customers and Microsoft, and what might happen in the future.
Of course, as I don’t work for Microsoft everything that I say is simply the result of analyzing what I see and hear in order to make some sense of what’s going on. Feel free to listen to the interview and tell me what you think!
– Tony
Thoughtsofanidlemind's Blog 
Hi Tony,
I just listened to your interview on RunAs. It was good to hear you give some context to the recent outages to cloud e-mail as I have had to have those discussions recently with clients. An outage is treated seriously (as it should be) and sensationally, but not always viewed in comparison to the internal e-mail service they may be moving away from. Outages will occur but surely one of the reasons to move to the cloud is the commitment of the provider to achieve and surpass the SLA over time.
You mentioned that once organisations have fully migrated to the cloud they can remove on-premise kit. I assume you are referring to Exchange servers as they will still require ADFS for the SSO? Also good to hear that 100,000 seat organisations have an appetite for the cloud.
An interesting interview.
Cheers
John
Hi John,
Yes, I am referring to Exchange servers. Obviously, if you want to have SSO between on-premises and cloud applications you need something like ADFS in place and some hardware will be required for that. In fact, I think most large companies that go towards the cloud will keep at least one or two Exchange on-premises servers in place if only because it provides them with the kernel of a back-out plan, just in case the wonders of the cloud aren’t quite as obvious as they might seem at first glance.
TR