At the Microsoft Inspire 2017 conference today, Quest Software unfurled a management platform designed to specifically manage and secure Microsoft Office 365 applications and instances of the Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD).
Michael Tweddle, president and general manager of the Quest Microsoft Platform Management business, says the first release of Quest On Demand will make it simpler to back up and recover Azure AD and Office 365 instances, attributes, groups and group membership. The Quest software-as-a-service (SaaS) application also enables IT administrators to employ policies to automate the management of Microsoft Exchange Online and Skype for Business Online.
Tweddle says Quest On Demand will over time morph into a full-blown management service that will provide a better overall experience because each module will be integrated using a common set of REST application programming interfaces (APIs).
“It’ll be a more unified experience,” says Tweddle.
Tweddle says Quest On Demand is designed to be much simpler for the average IT administrator to use. In contrast, Tweddle notes that most IT administrators today are required to master arcane PowerShell scripts to automate the management of Windows environments.
It’s unclear to what degree management of IT will move to the cloud regardless of where the application workloads are deployed. But if the management platforms running in the cloud provide a richer, more elegant experience, chances are high that IT departments will pursue the option that reduces their meantime to remediation most often.