It's an amazing time to be in technology!

The old saying is true - the only constant in life is change. Technology is changing faster than ever, but what a great time to be in IT!

Here are a few of the recent announcements from Microsoft that we find exciting:

Azure AD Domain Services - we've had many clients ask for this, and here it is! Azure Active Directory Domain Services lets you join Azure virtual machines to a domain without the need to deploy domain controllers.

Windows as a Service - what does this really mean? Windows as a service is the new model of rolling out steady, predictable updates, instead of major OS upgrades. Learn how to prepare your organization for Windows as a Service here.

More exciting news - Windows Branches! This concept allows you to test and pilot the Windows as a Service updates without deploying them to your entire environment.

And what about Azure File Storage? Azure file storage offers file shares in the cloud using the standard SMB protocol. You can mount a file share from either an on premise application or an application running in Azure.

Azure Backup is now in general availability, with some great features added in the GA release. Azure IaaS VM backup provides application consistent backup for Windows operating systems and file system consistency for Linux operating systems without the need to shut down virtual machines, making it enterprise ready solution. Azure Backup transfers snapshots taken on a VM to a secure, reliable Azure Backup vault and can restore the VM in a single click. Backups taken on virtual machines can be retained for long-term using industry standard GFS based retention policies.