Azure & Active Directory Center

If there is anything consistent about Office 365,  it's change . Not only do the services that you use all the time change constantly, but there are also new services added to Office 365 on a regular basis. Microsoft wants to build Office 365 into a complete business productivity suite, and they are doing that by making sure all your bases are covered.

For hybrid customers, Azure Active Directory Connect is one of the most important tools you need to keep Azure AD up-to-date. Besides directory synchronization, it provides means for authentication to Office 365 resources using password hash sync, pass-through authentication, or AD FS.

In my last blog post here, I wrote an introduction to Azure Resource Manager (ARM). ARM is the toolset Microsoft has added to Azure for provisioning and controlling resources in Azure.

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) is Microsoft's platform for deploying and managing resources within Azure. ARM allows you to build resource deployment templates using PowerShell and JSON scripts to build repeatable and consistent deployments in Azure.

A few months back, we did a short introduction to Advanced Security Management (ASM), a stripped-down version of the Cloud App Security suite, tailored to the needs of Office 365 administrators. As it is now a year since the product was officially launched, I thought it’s a good idea to take it for another spin and compare it to its big brother, in terms of Office 365 related functionalities that is.

The cloud! We get it. Specialization has been the way of the world since the industrial revolution, and IT isn't immune from that trend. 

The financial model makes sense for software companies and their customers. The support model makes sense for IT departments. Cloud makes sense for everyone…except when it doesn’t. 

One of the most important aspects of moving to a cloud solution like Office 365 is to provide a way for users to authenticate to their cloud resources. Organizations typically want to reduce administrative overhead and user confusion by managing only one directory, be it the on-premises directory (AD) or the cloud directory (Azure AD).

Ignite ended about a month ago, and it’s time to start exploring some of the new features and services that were introduced in Atlanta. In this article, we will take a look at Azure Information Protection, the next chapter in Microsoft’s data protection story.

Identity management is a huge part of any organization's migration into “the cloud.” Sure, you can move your email, your IM and presence, your document libraries, maybe even your voice and video services into Office 365. But unless your organization is very small, identity management will still take place in your own on-premises Active Directory.