In March 2021, Microsoft announced Operator Connect, a new way for organizations to connect Microsoft Teams to a telecom provider. From an enterprise buyer’s perspective, Operator Connect delivers a new “apps store” type of experience to enable organizations to choose a telecom provider and connect Teams users to the PSTN from the Teams admin center. Equally important, Operator Connect enables a new set of menu-based user configuration tools within the Teams admin center.

Like many in 2020, executives at this large oil and gas services company made the decision to have most employees work from home and to restrict all nonessential business travel in order to keep their employees safe. The company rose to this challenge at the very outset of the pandemic. A virtual private network (VPN) is the most common and secure way to provide access to company resources and data when employees are traveling or working remotely.

Can you run HAProxy as a Docker container? Yes! Did you even need to ask? Docker is ubiquitous these days and you’ll find that many applications have been Docker-ized; the HAProxy load balancer is no exception. Pardon the cliché, but HAProxy was born for this. As a standalone service that runs on Linux, porting it to Docker certainly seemed natural. Why would you want to run your load balancer inside of a Docker container? Are their performance penalties when doing so?

Following the security issues in the MSP market over the past 24 months, our customers, who are understandably concerned, have been asking what we do to keep the N-central® appliance (hosted or on-premises) updated and secure for them. I will do my best in this short article to outline how our engineering team keeps up with security. Please note this is valid as of the time of writing, but can change at any point.

The real-world use cases for deploying a Microsoft Direct Routing Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA)