Microsoft Azure Traffic Surges 775% Amid COVID-19 Outbreak

[AleksandarK]

Microsoft Azure, a cloud computing service, has seen a huge uplift in traffic/usage in the past few days amid the COVID-19 outbreak. In the places where the outbreak happened and people are enforcing social distancing, Microsoft reports that there has been a 775% traffic uplift compared to the previous situation. As everyone capable of working from home needs a communication tool, Microsoft Teams is a popular choice, and it has seen some amazing usage as well. The users of Teams service have generated over 900 million meetings and calling minutes on Teams daily in a single week, resulting in high server usage. The demand for Windows Virtual Desktops has tripled as well.


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[Vayra86]

Yep... we've only had a brief Teams outage in the past weeks at work. I have to say the internet is keeping up admirably over here given the circumstances.

BTW, Teams is pretty awful

 

[blobster21]

this will do.

 

[Cheeseball]

Yep... we've only had a brief Teams outage in the past weeks at work. I have to say the internet is keeping up admirably over here given the circumstances.

BTW, Teams is pretty awful

Agreed. Slack is still superior.

Microsoft hasn't been developing Teams enough to even match the featureset of Slack, which is quite sad. It doesn't even have proper Office add-in support for anyone to do anything with the GUI.

 

[Vayra86]

Agreed. Slack is still superior.

Microsoft hasn't been developing Teams enough to even match the featureset of Slack, which is quite sad. It doesn't even have proper Office add-in support for anyone to do anything with the GUI.

Yea man it feels like MSN met Skype with a few upgrades. All it lacks is that typical TUDUDUM! sound.

You can create channels, but there is zero integration. So in trying to bring things 'together' it really is just a new toolbox you gotta put together yourself. Luckily I heard Azure DevOps is coming our way in this company... its about effin' time... Once that is up and going Teams can be just for calls, which it does quite OK.

Now,, Azure DevOps is an MS app done right. Amazing stuff

 

[jeremyshaw]

Yea man it feels like MSN met Skype with a few upgrades. All it lacks is that typical TUDUDUM! sound.

You can create channels, but there is zero integration. So in trying to bring things 'together' it really is just a new toolbox you gotta put together yourself. Luckily I heard Azure DevOps is coming our way in this company... its about effin' time... Once that is up and going Teams can be just for calls, which it does quite OK.

Now,, Azure DevOps is an MS app done right. Amazing stuff

Glad I'm not the only one who is wondering what the point of Teams even was.

Amusingly, the signup page has three options. One of which just redirects you to sign up for Skype. I thought it was a joke, but MSFT is serious. Teams is so bad, they cannot even recommend it for casual use.

Honestly, I'd even consider Discord with a github bot and GoogleDrive bot to be vastly superior to Teams, especially if nobody has a discord account (allows for semi-anonymous sign-ins, by invite only - like Zoom's model. Teams and Slack [afaik] require an account).

 

[v12dock]

They are pushing Teams at my work and we are fighting tooth and nail to keep slack.

 

[lexluthermiester]

This article should be surprising to no one. I'm actually surprised demand is not higher...

 

[Cheeseball]

They are pushing Teams at my work and we are fighting tooth and nail to keep slack.

It's most likely due to the Office 365 deployment since Teams comes with it for free in the bundle. Slack gets costly at an enterprise-level. We have 550+ users on campus, so our estimate came up to $180/user/year.

We would love to go back to slack but the savings matter, unfortunately.

 

[EarthDog]

This article should be surprising to no one. I'm actually surprised demand is not higher...

Indeed. Water is wet.

 

[tygrus]

Not a global statistic and not for all of of Azure services.
775% applies to Italy and team service use.

Microsoft corrects '775 per cent cloud usage surge' claim: Big number only applied to Teams and only in Italy

Now that's a caveat

www.theregister.co.uk

“We have seen a 775 percent increase in Teams' calling and meeting monthly users in a one month period in Italy, where social distancing or shelter in place orders have been enforced.” Microsoft quote to The Register.

 

[Caring1]

Schools here are using Teams for home schooling during the lockdown, i'm not sure about the safety and ethics of that.

 

[notb]

Schools here are using Teams for home schooling during the lockdown, i'm not sure about the safety and ethics of that.

You're not sure about ethics of what exactly?

MS Teams is considered secure for enterprise use. You may be overestimating the secrecy of primary school math lessons...

We would love to go back to slack but the savings matter, unfortunately.

I'm not sure if money saving is the top reason (but surely near the top).

Slack was created as a tool for programmers/geeks.
Teams was created as a tool for everyone. And it pays off in a situation like the one we have - when we're forced to ask PC-laymans to work remotely - something that would probably never happen otherwise.

As for security: if a company already works on Azure or MS 365, Teams can be considered part of the environment, i.e. much easier to accept.
That means you could use Teams to transfer confidential information (e.g. client personal data).
Slack, totally regardless of encryption quality etc, is considered an external system and cannot be used for processing sensitive data.

 

[Cheeseball]

Slack was created as a tool for programmers/geeks.
Teams was created as a tool for everyone. And it pays off in a situation like the one we have - when we're forced to ask PC-laymans to work remotely - something that would probably never happen otherwise.

As for security: if a company already works on Azure or MS 365, Teams can be considered part of the environment, i.e. much easier to accept.
That means you could use Teams to transfer confidential information (e.g. client personal data).
Slack, totally regardless of encryption quality etc, is considered an external system and cannot be used for processing sensitive data.

I'm pretty sure Slack was created with the same goal in mind as when Microsoft Teams was created, which is for internal collaboration. It was created for everyone (regardless of technical skill level) within a company.

Security-wise, they're both the same. Integration-wise, they are also both the same, as you would need to install the appropriate apps for Teams to work with Azure and VS (this is the same with Slack). Teams is also hosted externally (as in on the cloud), on a mix of Azure and AWS servers (enterprise-grade), just like Slack. The choice of using either service would depend on your company's trust for Slack or Microsoft.

 

[notb]

I'm pretty sure Slack was created with the same goal in mind as when Microsoft Teams was created, which is for internal collaboration. It was created for everyone (regardless of technical skill level) within a company.

And yet, as little as 3 months ago, it was almost unknown outside software development.
Frankly, I don't think Slack popularity exploded in the last 2 months (like Zoom's did).

Security-wise, they're both the same. Integration-wise, they are also both the same

The key issue: many companies can't send personal data out of the corporate enviroment (be it on-premise or cloud). It's not allowed by law. End of story.
And they may not be keen to send other data as well.

Yes, Teams runs on Azure, but can be used together with Skype or Sharepoint, so that sensitive data stays inside the ecosystem.

Slack can't be run on-premise and doesn't provide the kind of integration you would need to e.g. become GDPR compliant.

As I said: the quality of encryption etc is irrelevant.
An unencrypted external drive or clients' data printed on paper are OK as long as they don't leave the office. External services aren't.

In other words:
1. You go full MS - you have an ecosystem that gives you all you need.
2. You go mixed MS + Slack - you pay the full MS price anyway, pay more for Slack and even more for the fuss needed to integrate and secure the workflow.

So yeah, either way works. And maybe Slack route is a bit better (at least for some users). But omitting Slack makes it much cheaper.
And companies are about making a profit.

 

[Cheeseball]

And yet, as little as 3 months ago, it was almost unknown outside software development.
Frankly, I don't think Slack popularity exploded in the last 2 months (like Zoom's did).

Ah, I wouldn't say just 3 months ago. I would say it boomed just over a year ago (late 2018) as I've seen other tech companies subscribe at the time. I've been using it for over a year as well.

The key issue: many companies can't send personal data out of the corporate enviroment (be it on-premise or cloud). It's not allowed by law. End of story.
And they may not be keen to send other data as well.

Yes, Teams runs on Azure, but can be used together with Skype or Sharepoint, so that sensitive data stays inside the ecosystem.

Slack can't be run on-premise and doesn't provide the kind of integration you would need to e.g. become GDPR compliant.

As I said: the quality of encryption etc is irrelevant.
An unencrypted external drive or clients' data printed on paper are OK as long as they don't leave the office. External services aren't.

I may have not fully understood your statement here, but Teams by itself does not have any on-prem solution (if it did I would've worked on rolling it out lol) but it does integrate with other on-prem services like Exchange, Active Directory and Skype for Business. Being GDPR-compliant would depend on a company's policy for the storing and sharing of PII/confidential info over and across any internal tools. Both Teams and Slack are GDPR-compliant services when used by themselves.

In my personal experience, I haven't used Teams or Slack for interacting with external persons (e.g. those not part of the university, non-staff, etc.).

 

[purplekaycee]

Everybody's home