About the Authors

Marshall Copeland is a cloud solution architect at Microsoft with expertise in cyber security. His work is customer-facing, and in 2008 he began directly supporting US state and local government accounts architecting Microsoft’s private cloud. He now focuses on Microsoft Azure Public Cloud, Government Cloud, and Hybrid Cloud for both Windows Server and Linux system workloads. Marshall’s career also includes architecture consulting for many Fortune 500 companies supporting technologies such as Active Directory enterprise architecture, systems management, and Cisco network engineering. Marshall is completing his Masters of Science in Information Assurance (MSIA) degree in cyber security from Dakota State University. He has presented at Microsoft TechReady, Microsoft TechEd, and Microsoft Management Summit. Marshall co-wrote Microsoft Azure: Planning, Deploying, and Managing Your Data Center in the Cloud and Microsoft Office 365 Administration Inside Out first and second editions. When not working, Marshall and his wife enjoy spending time with family and friends in Colorado.

Julian Soh, a principal architect at Microsoft, works with customers to evaluate, understand, plan, and adopt cloud-based technologies, such as Microsoft Azure and Office 365. Prior to joining Microsoft, Julian spent many years in the IT industry, spanning the private, public, education, and defense sectors in both leadership and technical roles. At Microsoft, Julian previously covered productivity technologies, such as SharePoint, Lync (now Skype for Business), Office, and Windows. Julian is also an author for the Microsoft Office 365 Administration Inside Out series.

Anthony Puca is a Microsoft datacenter solution specialist. Anthony has been consulting with US state and local government accounts on Microsoft Windows Server, System Center, Private, Public, and Hybrid Cloud Technologies for the last five years. His IT career started 24 years ago as a mainframe librarian for American Express. Anthony has been a consultant for Perot Systems, Avanade, and EMC Corporation with responsibilities for enterprise architecture, system engineering, network engineering, and database administration. In the last eight years, he has presented at Microsoft TechReady, Microsoft TechEd, Microsoft Management Summit, Microsoft Security Summit, VMworld, and various CIO summits across the United States. Anthony co-wrote three MOF whitepapers on change, configuration, and release management. He also authored the SAMS/Pearson book Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2 Unleashed, focusing on inventory management, software distribution, and operating system deployments; the O’Reilly book Microsoft Office 365 Administration Inside Out, and the Apress book Microsoft Azure: Planning, Deploying, and Managing Your Data Center in the Cloud. Anthony received Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional (MVP) seven times, from 2004–2010. These MVP awards were for datacenter monitoring with Microsoft’s System Center Operations Manager and Windows Management Instrumentation. Anthony’s customer demographics over the last decade include vehicle rental, retail, financial services, food processing, manufacturing, mining, healthcare, government, and energy.

Mike Manning in a Microsoft Certified Master in Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 with over four years of Office 365 deployment experience and two years of Microsoft Azure experience. Mike has been working in information technology for over 20 years, and he is very passionate about technology and the Microsoft cloud focus and direction. Mike’s other interests outside of information technology include his family, hockey, and baseball.

David Gollob has over 30 years of experience working in database and analytics systems. After receiving his degree in math and computer science at the University of Denver, Dave worked as a principal consultant for numerous Fortune 100 companies, helping them to develop enterprise business solutions, highly scalable OLTP systems, and data warehouse and analytics systems. Dave’s vendor tour started with Sybase, where he participated in two patents for his work at TCI Corporation focused on billing and distributed systems design. At Sybase, Dave also spent one-and-a-half years in Switzerland as the principal architect. In 1996, Dave joined Microsoft, where he remains today. Dave’s work at Microsoft includes his delivery as both a principal consultant as well as a managing consultant, where he founded the Microsoft Telecom Practice. Dave has presented and participated in numerous industry events, panel discussions, Microsoft technical events, and product review and feedback cycles. Today, Dave travels the western states visiting state and local government customers, evangelizing and assisting with data (big and small) architecture planning, advanced analytics, and solutions design. Dave enjoys his time with his family as well as mountain biking, skiing, hiking, and fishing in Colorado.