Most Popular Agile IT Blogs of 2018

Agile IT is built on three core tenants; Community, Security, and Digital Transformation. Our blog, Agile Insider, is driven by these values, seeking to provide our community of clients and subscribers (Nearly 40,000!) valuable content to help deliver best practices in both security and digital transformation. To celebrate our blog’s 11th year, we completed the following wrap up of the most popular Agile IT Blogs… by the numbers.

Office 365 License Comparisons – Our most popular blog ever. The huge amount of interest in this deep exploration of what is offered with Microsoft enterprise licenses, led us to expand the content, offering similar blogs to help businesses in Understanding Microsoft Government Licenses and a Comparison of Office 365 Academic Licenses. When that wasn’t enough, Agile IT CEO Conrad Agramont held a one hour Microsoft 365 and Azure Licensing Webinar explaining the entire Microsoft licensing landscape including how to make the best use of reserved instances and hybrid benefit to cut your cloud spending.

Office 365 Security Best Practices – Given the huge amount of security content written this year, it is surprising this stayed at the top of our most read blogs for so long. A simple look at the first steps needed to assure your Office 365 tenant is secured, this simple overview was the second most viewed blog published this year.

Is Office 365 Secure? – Yes. Office 365 is secure. In this blog, we take a myth busters approach to the biggest objections to cloud migration we have heard over the years, and explain why the Office 365 is often MORE secure that traditional infrastructure.

Getting Started in Microsoft Teams – It was a big year for Teams. From Skype for Business merging with the collaboration app, to finally usurping Slack as the most used business chat app. (Teams has 21% of market share, compared to 15% for Slack. When taking Skype for Business into account, Microsoft owns 65% of the workplace collaboration market.) This blog was inspired by our own internal drive to kill internal emails and move to Teams. From integrating OneDrive and SharePoint to offering guest channels for our clients to track their projects, we saw internal email use drop by nearly 90% in 45 days.

Inside Satya Nadella’s Modern Workplace – Microsoft Inspire 2018 was an amazing view into the wide ecosystem supported by Microsoft, from partners to products, attended by 17,000 professionals who enjoyed working sessions, played with new technology (The remote assistance HoloLens demo was particularly fun), and enjoyed catching up with long term collaborators. However, it was Satya Nadella’s keynote speech on the last day that brought everything together, as he explained how the broad offerings from Microsoft enabled the modern workplace, then went further to explain how consumer options from Windows to Xbox contributed to the modern lifestyle. If you want to see how Microsoft became the highest performing company of 2018, this is the video to watch.

Step By Step Azure Migration Planning – The opportunities of Microsoft Azure are truly as broad as the deep blue sky for which it is named. Understanding the opportunities presented by the cloud in 2018 can sometimes seem like trying to understand the impact of computers in general in 1980. Thankfully, the methods of moving your on-premises infrastructure to the cloud has a clear process.

Zero Trust Security in Microsoft 365 – No matter if you consider zero trust to be a new buzzword for decentralized cybersecurity, the architecture it describes is one of the most effective ways to defend a modern workplace that has left the traditional perimeter defense model painfully vulnerable to emerging attacks. This blog was part two in a series, and became part of our wildly popular Zero Trust Security eBook.

Phishing Attack Simulator – While many of our Tech Talks were popular, it was Kevin Martin’s demo of using Cloud App Security to launch a simulated phishing attack in Office 365 that made the top 10. Seeing him setup and launch a phishing attack in under five minutes not only showed how easy the tool was to use, but was a sobering reminder of how easy it is for real attackers and why Phishing continues to be the most popular method use to attack businesses. Want more great video demos? Check out our list of The Best Tech Talks of 2018.

Happy new year! We’ve already got tons of great new articles ready for 2019, and are planning on expanding our existing video library extensively over the next 12 months. To stay up to date on the latest in cloud security and digital transformation, subscribe here.