There’s no doubt that building disaster recovery (DR) plans for your organization can be tough. There are an amazing number of factors that you have to consider, plan for, and purchase.

Because half the planet is waiting for their new iPhone to arrive this morning, this edition of Short Takes looks at Microsoft coming victory in the cloud and its coming defeat in advertising, Microsoft Managed Desktop, another Google betrayal, and much, much more.

Ahead of Ignite, a few new Azure features have started to show up.

Aidan shows you how to deploy application security groups to create granular (per-NIC) network security group rules in the Azure Portal.

To make things easier for Office 365 tenant administrators, Microsoft has released four new administrative role for Teams. You can now assign these roles to other people and have them take care of areas like Teams general admin or the more complicated area of voice and audio meetings and calling. It’s a sign of increased maturity in the Teams product.

Jasper Oosterveld takes a look at the new document template experience within the Modern SharePoint Document Libraries.

Looking to create a Linux container in Windows 10? Russell shows you how with easy step-by-step instructions.

Google recently announced a new “What-If” tool that can be used to analyze changes to machine learning models.

Microsoft has scheduled 1,500+ sessions for the Ignite 2018 conference in Orlando next week. What’s happening for Office 365? Well, there are many sessions to attend, but the interesting thing is the huge number of sessions assigned to Teams compared to other workloads. SharePoint does OK, but Exchange is low, and Yammer gets a surprising allocation.

Microsoft Ignite is coming – and that means there will be lots of cloud news coming out of Microsoft.

Microsoft has pulled the covers off of its new managed desktop service which will provide Surface hardware and service the operating system.

Aidan explains how you can easily synchronize folders between multiple file servers via Azure File Sync.

Microsoft has detailed the exact reasons why its data centers went offline earlier this month and why it took longer for some users to recover their data.