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If you’re reading this, the odds are good that at some point in your life you’ve seen a Disney movie of some sort. Many of these movies feature some sort of magic device that lets the characters see things they otherwise couldn’t see. Think of the wicked queen in Snow White chanting “Mirror, mirror, on the wall”. Microsoft offers something very similar in the form of the service health dashboard (SHD) in Office 365.
Reddit, a popular online discussion site, has a running joke: would rather fight a horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses? This bizarre question has surprising relevance to Office 365, because while Microsoft customers often worry about the threat of a widespread large outage (the horse-sized duck), they’re actually getting beat up by a larger number of smaller, less damaging but still annoying outages (the group of duck-sized horses). There are deeper issues here that warrant a closer look in order to understand what the real risks are, and what you can do about them.
I can hear you now: “Wait! You and Tony record new episodes quarterly? In California? Why are you posting a new episode already?”
Hybrid environments are complicated. Microsoft has done tons of work over the years to try to simplify the hybrid experience—a huge task when you remember that hybrid Office 365 deployments can cover Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint, and Skype, along with cloud-only services such as Office 365 Groups.