In this series, we take a closer look at what it takes to support a successful Office 365 migration including the decisions, strategy, mobility, monitoring, and on-boarding aspects.

Part four of a series.

You have introduced Office 365 into your organization, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars, perhaps millions.

Now, of course, the CIO trusts your direction and ability. Yet, you still need more help. How will you ensure that you’re aware of the continued service availability and safety of your data?

I’m fairly certain that if Microsoft’s data centers, and Office 365, are ever completely offline, we’re going to be more concerned about our survival skills than the cloud (think Skynet). Aside from Armageddon though, Office 365 has enough built-in redundancy that unexpected outages are rare.

Since you’ve planned your service organization well, you’re covered around the globe and around the clock. Let us know if your support organization isn’t ready, so we can help with your design.

Key Office 365 Service Incident Features

Office 365 has you covered on basic insight, usage, security and updates. Here’s more on those key service health features:

Office 365

  • Admin App – Sends alerts on service health incidents. Available in Microsoft and Apple App stores. Coming Soon: Alerts will be available from the Service Health page.
  • Service Health Dashboard – View in the browser and drill-down into health incidents and usage reports.
  • The Security and Compliance Site’s Audit Reports – These audit reports allow ad-hoc reporting for user and admin actions such as file sharing, group management, or permissions elevation. It’s possible to search over 100 items by product.
  • Service Communications API – Develop against the API at this endpoint. Check here for more information.
  • REST Reporting web service – another endpoint to develop against for usage reporting and history about Mail, SharePoint, DLP, and Device Compliance. Check here for more information.

Of course, if you don’t want to invest in developing reports for health and usage, you have these options:

  • System Center – An Office 365 management pack you can plug into Microsoft’s enterprise configuration and monitoring system, which has been proven to work well over the years. If you already own System Center, check into it first.
  • Office 365 Monitor – Developed by former Microsoft employee Steve Peschka, this service uses a simple configuration of your tenant at the Office 365 Monitor site, and it offers an aggregated “360 degree” view of your tenant. For the price, you can’t beat it.

Centric Consulting has conducted numerous workshops and planning sessions with various organizations to prepare them for a secure trip to the cloud. Call on us to assist in planning your move.