About the authors

NIGEL CAIN leads the Windows and System Center Customer, Architecture, and Technology (CAT) team in the Asia-Pacific region. He and his team work closely with service providers (hosters) and enterprise customers, helping them take full advantage of Windows Server and Microsoft System Center. He has a keen interest in cloud computing from both a business strategy and technical viewpoint and has presented sessions on building and managing private and hybrid clouds at a number of industry events. Nigel graduated with an MBA from Warwick Business School in 2010. For more information, see http://uk.linkedin.com/in/nigelcain/.

DAMIAN FLYNN, MVP, Microsoft System Center and Datacenter, is the Infrastructure Technical Architect for Lionbridge Technologies (a localization, logo-certification, search, and content-services company and Microsoft Certified Gold Partner). Damian works closely with the business stakeholders, IT team, and partners, while also incubating new projects. His current focus is on software defined networks (SDN) with the Windows Azure Pack, with perspective on orchestration of repeatable processes in Development-Operations (DevOps) scenarios. Damian has presented sessions on private and hybrid clouds at numerous industry events and is a co-author of books focusing on Microsoft cloud solutions. He is active in many Microsoft programs, blogs at www.damianflynn.com and www.petri.co.il, tweets at @damian_flynn, and has published a number of white papers and technical articles.

ALVIN MORALES is a senior IT operations engineer at Microsoft and works closely with the Windows Server and System Center engineering team. His current focus is on integrating Microsoft System Center in the datacenter and private and hybrid cloud computing in service providers (hosters) and enterprise customers. He has presented sessions from an operational standpoint to help enterprise customers manage private and hybrid clouds. Alvin graduated from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez Campus and is currently working on his MBA in cybersecurity from the University of Dallas. For more information see http://www.linkedin.com/in/alvinmorales.

MICHEL LUESCHER is a senior consultant on the datacenter team in the Enterprise Services Division at Microsoft Switzerland, primarily focused on datacenter architectures. He joined Microsoft at the beginning of January 2009 and since then has been activity engaged with a number of different divisions and communities across the company. Michel is a well-known virtualization specialist, presenting at different internal and external events, and co-authored the Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Installation and Configuration Guide (John Wiley & Sons, 2013). Michel writes regularly about Microsoft virtualization and private cloud computing in his blog http://www.server-talk.eu. You can also find him on Twitter as @michelluescher.